The first 90 days in finance: Where early career momentum is built
About the Author
Ruairi O’Donnellan is the Head of Marketing at Intuition. Intuition is your end-to-end strategic learning partner, helping you identify, design, and deliver the knowledge and skills your teams need to succeed. The perspectives in this article are informed by discussions with Intuition colleagues who work closely with risk teams across global financial institutions, as well as by ongoing delivery of risk capability and problem-solving programs.
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- The first 90 days in finance determine integration speed, confidence, and long-term trajectory.
- Most analysts entering global banks and investment firms have already completed internships. They bring exposure. What they often lack is institutional fluency.
- Exposure is functional. Fluency is systemic.
- For early careers program leaders, the objective in the first 90 days is not remediation. It is structured integration.
- Leading institutions embed Intuition Know-How during this period to build that fluency deliberately and consistently across global cohorts.
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Intuition Know-How is a premier digital learning solution for financial services. It equips over 1 million financial services professionals with the knowledge to deliver in the rapidly moving global marketplace. The extensive Know-How content library is trusted by the world’s largest investment and commercial banks, leading asset managers, insurance firms, regulatory bodies, and professional services firms.
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Table of contents
Establishing a baseline
Even within a high-performing intake, variability is an inevitability. Analysts arrive from different desks, regions, academic programs, and internship functions along with different backgrounds, meaning your intake will be varied, but all will need to be brought up to a certain knowledge level to set in place the best possible chances of high performance.
Without deliberate alignment, this variability appears immediately in:
- Question quality
- Analytical confidence
- Ability to follow senior conversations
- Speed of task execution
You should look to consolidate core institutional knowledge across the cohort early on in their program.
This includes structured reinforcement of fundamental knowledge areas, such as:
- How banks generate revenue
- Balance sheet mechanics
- Capital and liquidity frameworks
- The role of treasury and funding
- Market structures and instruments
- Macroeconomic drivers
Of course, as mentioned, your intake will have varying degrees of knowledge on your chosen subjects, so specific learning interventions like ‘testing out’ can help save time for both the organization, and make work feel more fulfilling and purposeful for the learner.
Intuition Know-How supports this phase through practitioner-written tutorials across banking fundamentals, capital markets, financial statement analysis, and economic context.
Because the content is written by experienced finance professionals, it explains not only how concepts work, but why they matter inside institutions.
Embedding cross-functional understanding
Early in the program, analysts should also begin expanding beyond their immediate function, learning about other areas of the business that might impact their work or that they can potentially cross into later in their career.
Early-career professionals often understand their desk before they understand how the institution operates as an interconnected system, and both are key requirements.
Depending on role and location, structured cross-functional reinforcement could consist of knowledge development across:
- Credit risk and credit analysis
- Counterparty credit risk and derivatives exposure
- Market risk and liquidity risk
- Asset-liability management
- Basel III capital and liquidity requirements
- Corporate and investment banking products
- Portfolio construction and asset management
Intuition Know-How allows early careers leaders to curate structured pathways across areas such as the above, connecting topics coherently rather than leaving understanding fragmented.
This is where performance begins to differentiate. Analysts who recognize interdependencies across other key areas of the business relating to their work mature faster.
Developing institutional fluency and strategic awareness
As the intake progresses, focus shifts from comprehension to perspective.
The intake can then begin connecting operational knowledge to broader strategic themes shaping financial services that may impact their immediate work, or be useful as their career progresses within the organization.
This could include learning about:
- Sustainability and ESG
- Climate risk
- AI and generative AI
- AI ethics
- Digital assets and blockchain
- Digital transformation and operational resilience
- Evolving global regulatory expectations
Here is where structured knowledge transitions to strategic awareness.
Embedding compliance from day one
Compliance is obviously a fundamental part of a finance intake’s learning, going through key compliance areas not only protects the organization from a legal standpoint, but can also improve organizational performance through better decision making, improved risk awareness, reputational improvement, and operational efficiency.
The first 90 days shape how analysts think about governance, accountability, and risk ownership and should be a key consideration in your early careers program.
Intuition Know-How’s regulation and compliance coverage supports structured learning across:
- Basel III and capital regulation
- Anti-money laundering and sanctions
- Fraud and financial crime
- Ethics and conduct
- Conflicts of interest
- Data protection and privacy
- US, European, UK, and Asia-Pacific regulatory regimes
Embedding this understanding early influences decision-making long before formal regulatory assessments occur or other potentially negative outcomes become a reality.
Building performance maturity and judgment
AI tools can generate explanations instantly. What they cannot generate is institutional judgment.
The strongest early careers programs deliberately build:
- Contextual thinking
- Risk sensitivity
- Capital awareness
- Escalation judgment
- Systems-level reasoning
Intuition Know-How embeds nuance across its content because it is written by experienced practitioners.
Why leading early careers programs embed Intuition Know-How
Intuition Know-How equips over one million financial services professionals globally and is trusted by leading banks, asset managers, insurers, regulators, and professional services firms.
Within early careers programs, it is embedded:
- During preboarding
- Throughout the first 90 days
- Alongside instructor-led workshops
- As an ongoing reference tool
Its differentiators are clear:
- Human-written content by experienced finance practitioners
- Coverage structured around how finance operates in practice
- Flexibility to support global, role-specific cohorts
For early careers leaders, the objective is not simply delivery. It is consistent institutional fluency at scale.
Key takeaways
The most effective first 90-day strategies:
- Align foundational knowledge early
- Build cross-functional awareness deliberately
- Embed compliance and risk thinking from the outset
- Expand awareness to emerging strategic themes
- Accelerate judgment, not just information retention
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