Banking. From the ground up to the top floor.
What banking is, how it works, what it pays, and how to build a career in it across four countries.
A full knowledge base written from experience, not a textbook.
The banking world,
from the inside out.
Five sections. Real data. Zero jargon.
Five divisions.
One industry. Completely different worlds.
Most people interact with one part of banking their whole lives and never see the full picture. I've worked across four of these divisions over 10 years, in Nigeria, London, and Toronto. Here's what each one actually does, from the inside.
Gani's perspective: Access Bank Nigeria → JPMorgan Chase London → a global bank in Toronto. 10 years. This is what I actually saw.
Retail
Banking
Retail banking is what most people think of when they hear "the bank", branches, ATMs, current accounts, savings, and basic loans. It's the front door of the financial system and the division where most banking careers begin, including mine at Access Bank Plc in Lagos.
It's operationally intensive, customer-facing, and teaches you the fundamentals of how money moves at the ground level. Every transaction, every product, every complaint, it all passes through retail.
- Everyday accounts, current, savings, ISAs and cash management
- Basic lending, overdrafts, personal loans and credit cards
- Branch operations, relationship management and customer service
- Digital banking, mobile apps and payment infrastructure
- KYC, AML and regulatory compliance at customer level
- Mortgage products, origination, processing and servicing
Consumer
Banking
Consumer banking goes deeper than retail, it's about individual financial products at scale. Mortgages, personal loans, credit cards, wealth products, and the risk models, data analytics and behavioural insights behind them.
This is where banks make significant revenue from individuals, and where data science meets finance. If you understand credit risk, customer segmentation and lifetime value, you understand consumer banking.
- Mortgage origination, underwriting, approval and servicing
- Credit risk scoring, FICO, behavioural models, affordability tests
- Personal loans, car finance and consumer credit products
- Customer segmentation and lifetime value analytics
- Savings products, ISAs, fixed-term deposits, premium accounts
- Wealth management lite, unit trusts, investment accounts for mass market
Corporate
Banking
Corporate banking serves businesses, from small companies to large multinationals. The relationships happen at C-suite and board level, deal sizes run into the tens of millions, and the products are significantly more complex than anything in retail.
Cash management, trade finance, structured lending, FX hedging, corporate banking underpins how companies operate globally. Less visible than investment banking, but equally well-paid and arguably more stable.
- Revolving credit facilities and term loans for businesses
- Cash management, pooling, sweeping and liquidity optimisation
- Trade finance, letters of credit, export finance, guarantees
- Foreign exchange hedging and treasury risk management
- Syndicated lending, multiple banks funding one large deal
- Structured finance, complex, bespoke lending arrangements
Investment
Banking
This is where I spent most of my career, at JPMorgan Chase in London, across Regulatory Controls and Asset Servicing. Investment banking is the engine room of capital markets: M&A, IPOs, debt issuance, derivatives, and the complex infrastructure that makes global finance function.
It's demanding, technically sophisticated, and the highest-paying area of banking. It's also where the most interesting problems live, and where understanding the full system pays dividends.
- M&A advisory, buy-side and sell-side deal execution
- Equity capital markets, IPOs, rights issues, secondary offerings
- Debt capital markets, bonds, loans, structured products
- Sales & Trading, equities, fixed income, FX, commodities
- Asset servicing, custody, settlement, corporate actions, reconciliation
- Regulatory controls, trade reporting, capital adequacy, compliance frameworks
Private
Banking
Private banking is the most exclusive tier in all of finance. Clients typically hold $1M+ in investable assets, and the service they receive is entirely bespoke, from personalised investment strategies to estate planning, philanthropy and succession planning.
The relationship is everything. Private bankers manage a small number of very high-value clients, and discretion, trust and deep financial knowledge are non-negotiable. It's a long career path, but an extremely rewarding one.
- Bespoke investment strategy and portfolio construction
- Estate planning, trusts, wills and cross-border asset structuring
- Succession planning, passing wealth across generations tax-efficiently
- Lending against assets, property, art, equity portfolios
- Philanthropy, foundation setup, charitable giving strategy
- Alternative investments, private equity, hedge funds, direct deals
Popular roles in investment banking
What each role actually involves, not the job description version, the real version.
What banking actually pays
Real base salaries at Tier 1 banks, UK, Canada, and Nigeria. Bonuses can add 20 to 100% on top at senior levels. These figures are based on market data and industry experience across multiple Tier 1 institutions.
Disclaimer: These are estimates only. Salaries vary significantly by bank, year, city, performance, and negotiation. Use as a guide — not as a guarantee or professional financial advice. Verify current figures through your recruiter or offer letter.
Bonuses vary significantly by bank, year, and performance. Generally higher at senior levels and in investment banking divisions. The figures above are base salaries only.
UK & Canada: pension contributions, health cover, gym, share schemes, and often subsidised meals. Total comp significantly exceeds base.
Most offers have some flexibility, especially for experienced hires. It's always worth having the conversation, the worst they can say is no.
Knowing the job
won't get you hired.
Banking 101 tells you what each division does. Roles tells you the titles. Salary Guide tells you the pay. This tab tells you how to actually get hired — the part I had to figure out myself in Nigeria, the UK, and Canada.
Gani's perspective: The people who got in were not smarter than everyone else. They understood how the process actually works.
Note on the figures: The numbers below come from published bank disclosures and industry recruiting surveys, and are indicative only. Acceptance rates and recruiting calendars change every cycle — always check the bank's own careers page before you plan around a date.
Where are you starting from
Three routes in, and the advice is genuinely different for each one. Find yours before you touch your resume.
This is my own story, Nigeria to the UK to Canada. The part nobody warns you about: your title and years do not carry over automatically, and a decade of seniority abroad can start you closer to entry level locally.
Treat the first local role as a bridge, not a step down, and aim for a level you can clearly win at rather than the one you left behind.
What actually does transfer: proof you can learn an entire new system fast. You have already done it once.
Retail and Consumer are built to hire people from completely unrelated fields — customer service, retail sales, hospitality, call centers, all of it.
The skill is translation, not addition. A sales target you hit becomes a number on your resume. A difficult customer you talked down becomes your answer to the toughest interview question.
Spend a weekend learning how a checking account, an overdraft, and a mortgage actually work in plain terms. Some version of that question shows up almost everywhere, and it is a gap you can close before you even apply.
Insight weeks and spring weeks exist for one reason: you have no full time experience yet, and banks built a door for exactly that.
If your resume feels thin, case competitions, a finance or investment club, even a research paper you can talk about in plain language, all count as real material.
Do one informational interview with someone at each bank on your list before you apply there. It is the single highest leverage hour a student can spend.
How the process actually runs
Five stages, and each one screens for something different. Knowing which stage you are in tells you what to prepare.
Resume, sometimes a cover letter or a motivational questionnaire. Apply the week a posting opens. Most banks review on a rolling basis and close early once volume is high enough.
Numerical, logical, and situational judgement tests. Practise the format rather than the content — the time pressure is the real test, and it is the one thing you can rehearse away.
Thirty seconds to think, two minutes to answer, and no interviewer reacting to you. Record yourself answering three questions once before the real thing. It is uncomfortable, and that is the point.
A group exercise, a case study, and two or three interviews back to back. They watch how you behave in the gaps between exercises as closely as how you perform inside them.
References, background and credit screening, and for international hires, confirmation of your right to work. Nothing is final until those clear, so keep other processes warm.
Your resume, in six words or less
A number in every bullet, or it did not happen. "Responsible for client accounts" tells a recruiter nothing. "Managed 40 accounts, retained 95 percent" tells them everything.
- One page. Always. A second page rarely gets opened
- Their language, not yours, match the terms in the posting
- One division, sharpened, not a resume trying to impress everyone
- A number in every bullet, deals sized, accounts managed, percent improved
- Reverse chronological order, recruiters scan for dates and gaps before they read a word
- Plain formatting, no columns, tables, or graphics, the screening system reads text and not layout
- Education at the top only while you are a student, after your first role it moves to the bottom
- Name the file with the bank and the division, never "CV final v3"
Questions that show up almost everywhere
Not a script to memorise. Prepare an answer to each of these and you have covered most of what any first round will ask you.
Build three stories that each stretch to cover several of these, rather than one story per question. You will never have time to tell twelve, and interviewers can tell when an answer was written for a different question.
Networking, without being awkward
More than half of hires come through someone who already works there. That sounds unfair until you realise a stranger will usually give you fifteen minutes if you ask for the right thing.
- Ask for fifteen minutes and their story, never for a referral in the first message
- One specific question only they can answer beats any generic request
- Keep it to four sentences, and say which bank and division you are targeting
- Follow up once after a week, then leave it and move to the next person
- Write down what you learned and use it in the interview, that is the part that actually pays off
The week before, and the day of
- Reread the posting and your own resume the night before, they will quote both back to you
- Know one recent thing the bank did and one number from its last set of results
- Test the link, camera, and lighting a day early, not ten minutes early
- Two questions ready, and one thing you plan to send afterwards
- Write the thank you note the same day, short, specific, and referencing something they said
Want someone to run through your actual resume and your actual interview instead of a generic one?
Book a sessionTwo visa systems.
Everything I learned the hard way.
Nobody prepares you for the intersection of career ambition and immigration bureaucracy. I navigated both, twice. Here's what I learned, lived, and wish someone had told me earlier.
Important disclaimer: I am not an immigration lawyer, immigration consultant, or licensed immigration adviser. Nothing on this page is legal or immigration advice. Everything here is based purely on my own personal experience navigating these systems. All figures, thresholds, and timelines mentioned below reflect my experience and publicly available information at the time of writing — immigration rules change frequently and individual circumstances vary significantly. Always verify current requirements directly with UKVI, IRCC, or a regulated immigration professional before making any decisions.
The UK Skilled Worker visa (formerly Tier 2) is the main route for international professionals entering the UK job market. To get it, you need a job offer from a licensed sponsor, which means your employer must be approved by the Home Office to hire international talent.
In banking, large institutions like JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, HSBC and Barclays are all licensed sponsors. Smaller firms may not be, this is something to check before accepting an offer.
After 5 continuous years on a Skilled Worker visa, you become eligible for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), effectively permanent residency in the UK. This removes the employer tie and gives you the freedom to change jobs, take a career break, or start a business without visa consequences.
ILR is a significant milestone. Many people in banking reach it and stay, others, like me, use the stability it offers as a launchpad to explore other opportunities abroad.
Canada's work permit system is distinct from the UK's. Most employer-specific work permits require a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA), a document proving the employer couldn't find a suitable Canadian citizen or PR for the role. Some categories are LMIA-exempt, including intra-company transfers and certain trade agreement roles.
For banking professionals moving to Canada, intra-company transfer pathways (if your employer has a Canadian office) or Express Entry can be strong routes in, depending on your situation.
Canada's Express Entry system is one of the most transparent immigration pathways in the world, it's points-based, and your score (CRS score) determines your invite to apply for PR. Factors include age, education, language scores, and Canadian work experience.
As a banking professional with an MSc and English as a first language, you're generally well-positioned for Express Entry. Provincial Nominee Programs (PNPs) can also accelerate the process, Ontario, Alberta and BC all have strong banking sectors.
"Managing a visa while changing careers and countries simultaneously is genuinely one of the hardest things to do, not because it's impossible, but because nobody documents the combination. You're figuring out immigration law, employer sponsorship, and career strategy all at once. Banking Decoded will have a full guide to this, with the real details, not the sanitised version."
Run the numbers
yourself.
Four practical tools for salaries, taxes, immigration, and home financing. No login, no paywall, no nonsense.
Nigeria vs UK vs Canada vs USA
Pick any country as your base, enter your role and salary, and see what the equivalent role pays in each market — adjusted for what money actually buys you there.
What do you actually take home?
Gross salary is what they advertise. Take-home is what you live on. See the full tax breakdown for any banking salary in the UK, Canada, or USA.
Estimate your Express Entry score
Your CRS score decides your invitation to apply for Canadian PR. Enter your profile and see how to improve your chances.
See where every mortgage payment goes
Calculate payments, total interest, principal crossover, and a complete amortization schedule for Canadian, US, or UK mortgages.