Had my interview today, so let me do a recap while it's still fresh.
I got a VP who spent 15 years at Capital One before jumping to this company. He came in like a machine gun from the start — honestly it's a waste he's not a rapper.
He jumped straight into a case: OneMain's credit card business has two flows — a traditional branch business and a digital business. Q1 was why OneMain would want to give up the traditional business. I answered from the cost, revenue, and financial angles, but the interviewer was skeptical about my revenue point, so I re-clarified the question and asked what "branch" meant. He said it's the local business. I said maybe after testing they found digital revenue is actually the main driver, so they'd lean that way... and also that the market is going digital overall, so we can't afford to fall behind. He said that made sense.
Q2 gave a bunch of data for digital versus traditional — fixed cost, variable cost — but it was pretty messy. He asked what percent digital versus what percent traditional we'd need in year one to make a profit. Really it was just a cost-balancing question, but I wasted a good chunk of time on it because I think I mixed some numbers up. I ended up with 5% digital.
Q3: he said isn't that a bit small, and I just went along and said yeah. Thinking back on it, I should have said it makes sense, because in year one you wouldn't expect much of a shift to digital anyway.
Q4 asked how to increase that 5%. I gave a bunch of answers. First, on the customer side: demand, pricing strategy, referrals, lowering prices or running promotions to get existing customers onto digital. On partnerships: bundling with other companies to increase our exposure, ads on streaming and online platforms. And I also mentioned risk — we'd need to think about our budget.
Q5: he talked so fast I couldn't catch it, but I later realized he was asking whether the fraud risk and credit risk from going digital would increase. I think I went off track — I should have said fraud risk goes up because digital lets people skip verifying physical/biometric information and just use the service directly. Instead I answered that we can't verify whether these customers will stick with us long-term versus just depositing money for the promotion and then immediately moving it to a competitor's credit product. Thinking about it now, I don't think I answered that one well.
Ugh, overall it felt pretty hard. It really did require some domain knowledge, but I got careless — everything I saw online about this company was just simple calculations. It's also possible that since this interviewer came from Capital One, he's just using Capital One's question bank directly. I did grind a lot of Capital One-style questions, but I really did overlook the fraud risk angle.
Guess I'll just leave it to fate now. It really feels like DS new grad is brutal this year — I'm endlessly anxious right now.
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