DBS Investment Trading Technology – Solution Delivery

Business Analyst Written Test

Congratulations on being selected for the DBS Investment Trading Technology’s Business Analyst
test selection round.

There are a total of 4 questions.

These questions are designed to assess your analytical skills, thought process, attention to detail
and your general Business Analyst competency level.

Should you be successful, your recruiter will contact you to proceed to the next interview round.

In the interview round, you will be asked to present, in more detail, on one of the questions you
have answered below.

All the best to you!

Question 1
You are a Business Analyst who is meeting up with various Salespersons to understand their current
processes, assess and propose improvements.

Below are snippets of the conversation you had with a Sales Manager, John.

John is a Sales Manager selling variety of equity and FX derivative products to a segment of clients.

a) Draw a business process flow diagram to illustrate John’s existing processes.

b) Based on your initial assessment, propose improvements to John’s existing processes. Draw a
business process flow diagram to illustrate the proposed future flow and incorporate these
improvements.

“Sometimes, I get referrals from colleagues from other parts of the business. But sometimes, the clients
will approach me directly too.”

“It depends on the clients. Some knows what they want and will confirm an order quickly. Others might be
new to the market and will call me a few times on the products and prices. It’s quite troublesome because
prices for simple products are available in the system but for the more complex ones, I have to contact the
Pricing Manager.

Sometimes I can’t get him because he’s talking to other sales managers and when the client gets
impatient waiting for the price, I might lose the deal.”

“Concurrently, I have to reply clients’ pricing enquiries on our chat messaging system and emails so it’s
quite tedious.”

“Once the client has confirmed an order, we will need to send them a termsheet document on the same
day. The document will contain important details about the deal. Some clients may acknowledge but it’s
not mandatory. We need to archive these documents for audit purposes.”

“For confirmed orders, our operations department will compare the document order details against the
order details captured in the company’s system. If there is any discrepancy, the operations department
will speak to Sales to determine if the document or the order in the system is incorrect. If the document is
incorrect, I will need to re-generate the document to the client and operations department. If the order in
 DBS Investment Trading Technology – Solution Delivery
Business Analyst Written Test
the system is incorrect, I will need to cancel and re-input a new order for Operations department to verify
again.

The Operations department tends to inform me late about such errors, so I can have to rush these at night
as they need to be done on the same day as the order confirmation.”

“Currently, I manually prepare the termsheet document via Microsoft word. Some of my colleagues uses
excel instead. Although our Legal and Compliance department provides copies of the termsheet
documents in the group shared folder, it’s more convenient to maintain the copies on my own computer
so I can make changes quickly.”

“Some of my clients do complain that the termsheets they received from my colleagues are different from
mine and it is confusing to them. I guess it’s something we have to live with because it’s hard to ask the
Sales team to always refer to the shared folder.”

“When the client enquires about products or prices, I will reply via email. Sometimes, I may provide them
with an indicative termsheet document to provide more information. However, the document has to be
clearly marked as indicative.”

“I want to focus more on Sales activities instead of these administrative tasks. The company should
provide more support to us on expanding our client base. For example, I do not have readily available data
on the volume of orders that my existing clients are placing daily, monthly, yearly.

I do not know how many clients have made enquiries but did not confirm an order ultimately. Also, I do
not know the reason why they did not proceed with an order. It could be because our pricings are not
competitive enough or because we do not respond fast enough.

I will manually collate some transactional data in excel for my analysis, but this is time-consuming and not
sustainable in the long run.”

Question 2
Select an issue you want to address from the case study in the first question.

Write the requirement in User Story format and provide SMART acceptance criteria that your
development team can use to develop a solution.

Ensure you have provided sufficient details for your development team to start work.

(SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound)

Question 3
You are free to include details based on your past project experiences or coming up with new ones for the
below scenarios.
Please include email subjects in each of the responses below.

a) Write an email to a Customer saying ‘No’ to a feature requested by the Customer

 There is demand pouring in as change requests and the team does not have enough capacity to do
it without compromising the original scope.

b) Write an email to an ‘Angry Customer’

 Assume – Delivery, Meetings, Updates on projects and action items are not timely and or
effective. Like team is not available or on time for meetings, only some people are speaking up
during team meetings etc…
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Business Analyst Written Test
c) Write an email to your manager, escalate a problem at the ‘right time’ to get more help

Question 4

Select an application that you have worked on previously and come up with a PowerPoint presentation.

Scenario

You are the Business Analyst of ABC Product Company who has developed this application.

Your target audience is a potential customer who has used your product in his previous company a few
years back. There have been many changes to the product since he last used it. Your role is to brief him on
the product, set out the company’s expectations on how he (the user) will be engaged for the product
delivery lifecycle and explain in more detail 1-2 key features.