PurPassionCity

Credit Analyst / Credit Risk Analyst

The pull to discern what's good from what isn't

Judgement · Undifferentiated → Distinguished

The shape of the work

Pace
  • A hard push you keep up for a long stretch
  • Patient work over a long time, where showing up matters most
What your week looks likeMonday-to-Friday, roughly 9-to-5
How much you move around at workScreen and chair, almost all day
Whether you can work from anywhereMostly remote, but you show up sometimes
How quickly you receive feedback on your workTakes a season or a project cycle
What you're actually working withNumbers, measurements, records — things you read on a screen / Concepts, theories, designs, stories — things you think up / Other humans, face-to-face — talking, teaching, treating, leading

Behaviours this work is made of

Core
  • Breaking something into its real components.
  • Committing to a course of action when the right answer is uncertain and delay has a cost.
  • Determining the quality, value, or merit of something through informed assessment.
Also present
  • Making expert knowledge available to someone else's decision — seeing what they can't see from experience and making that sight useful, without owning the outcome.
  • Creating the record that allows others to understand later.
  • Quantifying what's happening so it can be reasoned about precisely.

In words

A credit analyst works out how likely it is that a borrower will pay back what they owe, and writes a recommendation on whether to lend, how much and on what terms. The borrower might be a small business asking a bank for a loan, a large company issuing bonds, or a customer who wants to buy goods on account. The analyst reads the borrower's accounts, cash flow and debts, compares them with similar companies, and tests what would happen if sales fell or interest rates rose. The pull is Judgement: a stack of figures that all look plausible has to become a clear view of whether this borrower is a safer bet than that one.

The work looks like accounting but ends differently. An accountant mostly records and reports what has happened. A credit analyst uses the same figures to make a call about the future, and the call can be wrong in either direction: lending to a borrower who fails costs the lender money, and refusing a good borrower costs the lender a customer. The job is called a credit analyst or credit risk analyst in most countries, and a loan officer or underwriter in some banks, though in other organisations those titles cover somewhat different work.

There's a guide here if you want one

Kitsune can talk through anything on this page — whether it might suit you, what to do next, questions this page doesn't answer. Everything here is yours to read either way.

Most of the skill is in the written recommendation, not the model. A committee wants a clear answer in a page or two, with the main risks stated and a view on how serious each one is. Analysts who can explain a number plainly get more trust than analysts who build the most complicated spreadsheet. The numbers are also never the whole picture: how long a business has traded, who runs it and how it behaved in the last downturn count for as much as one year's profit.

The job is more cyclical than most finance roles. In good years lenders compete for borrowers and the pressure is to approve more. In bad years the work shifts to watching existing loans and deciding what to do about the ones going wrong, which is harder and more stressful.

Most analysts start with a degree in accounting, finance, economics or a similar subject, and join a bank, lender, insurer or ratings agency as a junior or trainee analyst, learning the methods on the job. Some move across from accounting practice or from a bank's customer-facing roles. Professional credentials exist in many countries, such as a credit or risk qualification, a chartered finance designation or, in some countries, a chartered accountancy qualification. The usual next steps are senior analyst, credit manager or portfolio risk manager, and some move into relationship management, underwriting or corporate finance.

Before you go