Back to school day at banking school

With a commercial profile, the thirty-year-old enrolled in the fourth promotion of a "bachelor" (bac+3 level) on a work-study basis. It will swell the troops of agency advisors of the leading French bank, which is recruiting by the hundreds.

The first morning is devoted to the meeting between students, divided into tables with evocative names (CAC40, Nasdaq, etc.) and to the presentation of the supervision, in the excitement of a back-to-school day.

Customer discovery, savings and loan products, risk assessment, regulatory obligations... For one year, students will learn the banking profession, alternating one week of classes, shared between the Higher School of Banking and the premises of BNP Paribas in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, and three weeks in an agency.

The bank made the choice at the start of 2022 to create its own apprentice training center (CFA), like Crédit Agricole (Difcam), Orange and La Poste before it.

Having control over the training allows "to make it more operational, more practical, more BNP Paribas-inflected", explains the school's director, Frédéric Aubineau, to AFP.

According to him, work-study allows for a better retention rate of hired students, loyal to the employer who put them on the job. From their first day, the student benefits from the advantages of a large group: works council, profit-sharing and participation policy, etc.

BNP Paribas puts its students in the best conditions for their four-day integration seminar, on the Louveciennes campus (Yvelines), a 23-hectare park housing two castles owned by the bank, a few kilometers from the capital.

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The group trains young and old people with baccalaureate to master's degrees, in Ile-de-France, but also in Bordeaux, Marseille and Lille, without necessarily having banking experience. It targets 600 students at the start of the 2025-2026 school year.

It must be said that its needs are enormous, particularly for banking advisor positions, with 500 to 600 positions to be filled each year in the greater Paris region alone.

The profession increasingly needs new blood to fill the mass departures (retirement, resignations, etc.). In 2022, one in seven banking employees in office on January 1 was no longer there by December 31, according to the French Banking Association (AFB).

Working conditions can be difficult in branches: the Banking Jobs Observatory noted last June for certain positions an increase in the workload in branches due to regulations and difficulties in keeping up with commercial objectives. .

This did not frighten Alyssa Thomasson, 23, who already works at BNP Paribas as a payroll manager. “I wanted to broaden my horizons in banking,” she explains.

“What attracts me is customer contact,” adds Zidane Touati, 25, who worked for Société Générale and Banque Populaire. “We are not only a banker, we are also an insurer, sometimes a social worker,” he notes.

If the bank may encounter recruitment difficulties, this is not the case for the school, assures Mr. Aubineau, who received more than 2024 CVs for the “bachelor” training for the 400 calendar year.

Candidates must have a bac+2 degree and pass a certain number of tests, individually and then in groups, before being accepted.

Not everyone will ultimately stay with BNP Paribas: half of the students enrolled in the first class of September 2022 are continuing their path outside the group, and the same would be true for the second, which began in January 2023.