Will spending tens of thousands on an MBA from a leading international business school help land you an investment banking job in Hong Kong or Singapore? It largely depends on which school you choose, according to eFinancialCareers data. We’ve trawled through our CV database to find finance professionals who’ve attended the world’s top-10 MBA schools – from Harvard to Haas – and are now living in Hong Kong or Singapore.
We’ve then looked at the percentage of graduates from each institution who are working in investment banking rather than in other parts of the finance sector. If the main aim of your MBA is to land an investment banking job in Hong Kong or Singapore, then Wharton School of Business is your best bet – of its graduates who are working in financial services, a high 41% have IBD roles, as the chart below shows. Second and third places are also taken by US schools: Stanford School of Business (a 35% investment-banking ratio) and Harvard Business School (31%).
If you want to study closer to home but still have your sights set on the front-office then Insead, which has a campus in Singapore, achieves a respectable 30%. There are four schools clustered in the mid-20s, but the laggard is Sloan, which appears to be an institution to avoid within Asian investment banking despite its elite status as an MBA school.