The back office is usually not seen by clients. It the customer-facing front office to the various systems the bank uses to deliver its financial products

Completely by coincidence, the April 1 episode of ‘A Dictionary of Finance’ podcast by the European Investment Bank starts with a comedy sketch acted by Ildiko Buruts, head of the contract reviews and amendments unit, and Christian Kyster, head of the loan administration unit at the Bank. For your listening pleasure, they present a hilarious anecdote about the back office!

We invited Christian and Ildiko out of the back office for about 25 minutes or so to tell us about what goes on there.

Christian delivers a stunning analogy between the back office of a bank and the kitchen of a restaurant. If a diner wants his steak tartare with mayo and marshmallows, what does the waiter/waitress do? He or she goes to the kitchen to figure out if such a dish can be served. That’s exactly what the back office of a bank does, figuring out how the deal proposed by the front-office can be carried out.

Sticking with culinary vibes, we also discuss how a decrease of plain vanilla financial products means more work for the back office, because back office staff have to figure out how to hook up tailor-made financial solutions to the various back office systems that are needed to make it happen.

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