What is a Business Analyst at M&T Bank?

As a Business Analyst—specifically within our Business Analytics and Reporting teams—you are the vital bridge between complex banking data and strategic decision-making. At M&T Bank, we pride ourselves on a deeply community-focused, relationship-driven approach to banking. To maintain this standard, our business leaders rely on accurate, timely, and insightful data to understand customer behaviors, optimize operations, and ensure strict regulatory compliance.

In this role, your impact is immediate and highly visible. You will directly influence how our retail, commercial, and operational teams interpret performance metrics. Whether you are stationed in our Getzville, NY tech hub or operating in a hybrid capacity out of New York, NY, you will be building the reporting infrastructure that keeps our bank competitive and secure. You are not just pulling numbers; you are crafting the narratives that guide multi-million dollar business strategies.

Expect a dynamic environment where analytical rigor meets practical business application. The scale of our data is massive, and the complexity of financial regulations adds a unique layer of challenge to your daily work. If you enjoy untangling ambiguous business problems, designing intuitive dashboards, and driving clarity across cross-functional teams, this role at M&T Bank will be both challenging and deeply rewarding.

Common Interview Questions

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparing for a Business Analyst interview at M&T Bank requires a balanced focus on technical data skills and business acumen. We want to see how you think, how you handle data, and how you communicate your findings to non-technical stakeholders.

Focus your preparation on these key evaluation criteria:

• Analytical Problem-Solving – We evaluate your ability to take a vague business request and translate it into a concrete data solution. You can demonstrate strength here by walking us through how you break down problems, identify necessary data sources, and structure your analysis.
• Technical Proficiency (Data & Reporting) – This measures your hands-on ability to query, clean, and visualize data. Expect your interviewers to probe your comfort level with SQL, advanced Excel, and visualization tools like Tableau or Power BI.
• Communication and Stakeholder Management – As a liaison between IT and business units, your ability to communicate clearly is paramount. Show us how you gather requirements, manage pushback, and explain complex data concepts to leadership.
• M&T Bank Culture Fit – We value collaboration, integrity, and a strong sense of ownership. You will be evaluated on your ability to work seamlessly within a team, adapt to shifting regulatory priorities, and maintain a customer-first mindset.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for a Business Analytics Reporting Analyst I at M&T Bank is designed to be thorough but conversational. We aim to assess both your foundational technical skills and your behavioral alignment with our core values. You will typically begin with a recruiter phone screen, which focuses on your background, hybrid work expectations in New York or Getzville, and high-level technical familiarity.

Following the initial screen, you will move into discussions with the hiring manager and senior analysts on the team. These rounds often blend behavioral questions with practical scenario-based inquiries. We do not typically rely on highly aggressive, whiteboard-style coding interrogations; instead, we prefer practical discussions about how you would write a SQL query to solve a specific banking problem or how you would design a dashboard for a branch manager.

Our interviewing philosophy is highly collaborative. We want to see how you handle follow-up questions, how you respond to new constraints, and how you partner with the interviewer to arrive at a solution. The process is designed to mirror the actual day-to-day interactions you will have with stakeholders at the bank.

This visual timeline outlines the typical stages you will progress through, from the initial recruiter screen to the final panel interviews. Use this to pace your preparation—focusing heavily on your resume and behavioral stories early on, and shifting toward technical scenarios and dashboard design concepts as you approach the final rounds. Keep in mind that specific stages may vary slightly depending on the exact business unit you are interviewing for.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

To succeed in your interviews, you must demonstrate competence across several distinct domains. Our interviewers will dig into your past experiences to understand how you apply your skills in real-world scenarios.

Data Querying and Manipulation (SQL & Excel)

Your ability to extract and manipulate data is the foundation of this role. Interviewers will assess your comfort with relational databases and your ability to write efficient queries. We look for candidates who can confidently navigate complex datasets without needing constant hand-holding.

Be ready to go over:

• SQL Fundamentals – JOINs, GROUP BY, aggregate functions, and basic subqueries.
• Advanced Excel – Pivot tables, VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP, nested IF statements, and data validation.
• Data Cleaning – Handling missing values, identifying duplicates, and ensuring formatting consistency.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Window functions (e.g., ROW_NUMBER(), RANK()), optimizing slow-running queries, and basic ETL concepts.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk me through a time you had to pull data from multiple disparate tables to build a single comprehensive report."
• "How would you write a query to find the top 10% of customers by transaction volume in a given month?"
• "Explain how you would handle a situation where the data you queried contains significant discrepancies from what the business expected."

Reporting and Data Visualization

Data is only useful if it can be understood. We evaluate your ability to design intuitive, actionable reports and dashboards. Strong performance here means you think about the end-user first—designing visualizations that immediately highlight key trends, risks, or opportunities.

Be ready to go over:

• Dashboard Design Principles – Choosing the right chart types for specific data stories.
• BI Tools – Experience with Tableau, Power BI, or similar enterprise visualization platforms.
• Performance Metrics – Understanding how to track KPIs and build automated reporting cadences.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Row-level security in BI tools, creating dynamic parameters, and automating report delivery.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "If a regional manager asks for a dashboard to track branch performance, what metrics would you include and how would you visualize them?"
• "Tell me about a time you had to simplify a highly complex report for an executive audience."
• "How do you ensure your dashboards remain performant as the underlying dataset grows?"

Business Acumen and Stakeholder Management

As a Business Analyst, you are a consultant to the business. We evaluate how well you understand business objectives and how effectively you manage relationships. Strong candidates demonstrate empathy for stakeholders, ask probing questions to uncover true needs, and manage expectations around delivery timelines.

Be ready to go over:

• Requirements Gathering – Translating vague requests ("I need a sales report") into technical specifications.
• Cross-functional Collaboration – Working with data engineering, risk, and front-line business teams.
• Banking Domain Knowledge – Basic understanding of financial products, risk management, or regulatory reporting.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Agile methodologies (Scrum/Kanban), writing formal Business Requirements Documents (BRDs), and navigating strict regulatory compliance constraints.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time a stakeholder asked for a report, but you realized they actually needed something entirely different."
• "How do you prioritize your workload when you receive urgent data requests from multiple different department heads?"
• "Describe a situation where you had to push back on a stakeholder's request because the data did not support their hypothesis."