How to tell your story when your background isn’t finance

f there’s one fear I hear over and over again, it’s this:

“I don’t come from a finance background… so how do I convince bankers to take me seriously?”

I get it. When I was switching into IB in London, I felt the same. I didn’t have a finance degree. I wasn’t coming out of a target school. My CV didn’t look like the typical “analyst pipeline.”

But here’s the truth: you don’t need a finance background to break in. What you do need is the ability to tell your story in a way that makes sense to a banker.

Most people get this wrong. They either:

• Try to hide their past (“let’s hope no one notices I was an engineer/consultant/IT manager etc”).
• Or they give a vague story that doesn’t connect (“I always liked finance, so I thought I’d apply”).

Neither works. Bankers aren’t looking for excuses. They’re looking for evidence you can survive deal work.

When I finally figured this out, my approach changed completely. Instead of running from my background, I reframed it.

If I’d worked on projects, I turned them into numbers.

If I’d led a team, I framed it as execution under pressure.

If I’d delivered results, I translated them into “deal language.”

Here’s what that looks like:

• Instead of “Handled vendor relationships,” say: “Renegotiated top-5 supplier contracts; locked 9% cost reductions and 45-day payment terms, improving working capital by $600k.”
• Instead of “Worked on product roadmap,” say: “Owned pricing model for new SKU; ran sensitivity analysis, recommended 7% price lift → +$2.1m ARR without churn spike.”
• Instead of “Managed clinic operations,” say: “Streamlined patient flow; cut avg wait time 31% and increased daily throughput by 18%, unlocking $480k annual revenue.”

See the difference? One sounds like a job description. The other sounds like someone who understands numbers, pressure, and senior stakeholders — exactly what bankers want.

But telling your story isn’t just about rewriting CV bullets. It’s about connecting the dots in interviews.

You need to be able to say:

• “Here’s where I started.”
• “Here’s what I learned along the way.”
• “Here’s how those skills transfer directly into finance.”

That’s how you turn “random background” into “logical candidate.”

When I work with clients inside Charter Mastery, this is one of the first things we tackle. I’ll look at their background — engineering, IT, healthcare, law, whatever — and strip away 70% of the fluff. Then we build a narrative that actually positions them as finance-ready.

And once that story is clear, everything else becomes easier. Recruiters start listening. Interviews stop feeling like an uphill battle. And suddenly, they’re not the “non-finance candidate” anymore — they’re just a strong candidate.