Target universities, country by country

01the list

• The UK six^1,2

  Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, UCL, Warwick and Imperial. Two independent lists agree on those six, and Trackr's 2025 list adds Bocconi as the only target outside the UK. Durham, Bristol, Nottingham and St Andrews are the usual semi-targets.

• Outside the UK, the list is about ten names^1-3

  HEC, ESSEC, ESCP, ICADE, ESADE, IE, Bocconi, St. Gallen, WHU and Mannheim are the continental targets in the most widely used guide, with RSM, Solvay, CBS, SSE and NTNU added for London's Benelux and Nordic intake. Bocconi is the only continental university on Trackr's 2025 list of targets for UK banking.

• On the continent, the master's is often the recruiting degree^3-5

  In the UK banks hire from the three-year bachelor's. Across much of the continent the finance degree that banks recruit from is a master's: HEC's grande école programme runs as M1 and M2, and WHU's Master in Finance takes 17 or 21 months. A strong bachelor's there is mostly the ticket into the right master's.

next: what the data says →

02what the data says

Target lists are opinions. The few counts that exist come from public profiles, and they are old and partial, but they are counts.

• Front office looks different from all banking jobs⁶

  In the same 2021 count across all banking roles, LSE led with 22% and Cambridge and UCL followed at 10%; restricted to front-office juniors, Bocconi rose to second with 16% and HEC to third with 13%, while Oxford and Cambridge fell to 5% each. The continental business schools send more of their graduates to the deal-facing seats.

• The master's programmes that place best⁷

  A 2024 ranking of master's in finance programmes by the share of alumni in front-office investment banking roles put Imperial first, Warwick Business School second and LSE fifth, with two US programmes between them. Three of the top five are in London.

• What the Bocconi numbers say about the process⁸

  The same page reports that 2023-24 MSc Finance graduates averaged 6.9 job interviews and 2 offers, and 82.7% had a job on graduation day. That is what a target programme looks like from the inside: the process runs during the degree, and most of the class has finished it before the degree has.

next: country by country →

03country by country

• France: the gap year is the internship^4,9

  HEC's Master in Management lets students take a year between M1 and M2 for professional experience, which recruiters see as two six-month internship periods, and its end-of-study internships often serve as pre-employment. For banking that gap year is where the experience a graduate offer depends on gets built.

• Italy: off-cycle into a job, and most Bocconi finance graduates leave^8,10

  An older interview on the Italian market describes no structured summer internships: students take an off-cycle internship in the last six months before graduating and convert it into an offer. Bocconi's own figures for its MSc Finance show 94.9% employed a year after graduating (2022-23 class), with 60.8% of those working outside Italy.

• Germany: WHU and Mannheim, and a small class⁵

  WHU's Master in Finance class of 2028 has 106 students from 17 nationalities, and the school reports it as first in Germany in the FT ranking for the seventh year running; its listed graduate employers include Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Rothschild & Co, Deutsche Bank and UBS alongside the consultancies. The Frankfurt page covers the market those graduates mostly enter.

• Switzerland: St. Gallen^6,11

  St. Gallen is the Swiss university on the standard lists, and its Master in Banking and Finance names UBS, J.P. Morgan, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs among its top employers for 2023-2025 - behind McKinsey, BCG and Bain. It ranked tenth among European universities for front-office juniors in the 2021 count.

next: from outside the list →

04from outside the list

• Target status matters less at the margin than people think³

  The gap that matters is between elite and unknown universities; between a target and a good semi-target it is much smaller. A candidate outside the list compensates with near-perfect grades, a finance or accounting degree, real internships and networking.

• The standard repair route is a target master's^3,10

  A non-target bachelor's followed by a master's at a target is the usual way back in, and it works best with a finance internship already done before the master's starts. The master's page covers which programmes do this and what their calendars cost you.

• Networking matters most for exactly this candidate^1,12

  Even where networking is said to count for little, as in London, the main guide's view is that it still helps students at non-target universities, and for off-cycle roles and smaller firms. For a student banks do not visit, writing directly to nearby smaller firms is often the only way to an interview.

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