Roast my banking CV: "I made 35 applications and got no offers"

Your covering statement says you want to break into Investment Management but the article headline says Banking CV. Two different industries, misleading. You seem to have a directly relevant degree for Investment Management, so ignore all the comments about IB.

Graduate schemes going into a global recession will be tougher than usual. I would suggest targeting smaller investment managers and take any job that is on offer to gain experience. Your career will likely be long and some investment management experience is better than none.

Frankly degree subjects/institutions matter less when approaching non formal graduate opportunities as on graduate milkrounds they are used as a filter for hundreds of candidates.

Be persistent, watch youtube videos, network on LinkedIn, ask people how they got their job and what do they enjoy about it.

Good luck

It also appears that you did not get an "Upper Class, First Division" degree.
A 2:1 is an upper second class...

Do be careful of the HR screening processes that may reject you for overstating this classification.

Honestly, some of the previous comments are enough to put anyone off of the industry.

Understand that your name is a pseudonym, but this is the first thing that is obvious to me, HR departments are really pushing for more diverse hires on grad schemes. If your name sounds "white male", you may be in close competition with many others... try roles outside of the milkround. Entry level analyst roles exist so do apply for these and tailor your CV for specific roles.

Previous advice to "go and get an MSc", just hilarious. Shows how out of touch with reality many are/become in finance. A UK post graduate loan will barely cover 1/3 of the course fees and that's before living costs. For a PG degree in investment/finance you need a diversity quirk (for those niche scholarships) or the bank of mum and dad... The previous suggestion of attending a European uni was once a good solution, however Brexit likely killed that option.

Suggest you remove coffee as your primary interest, coffee snobs in the workplace are just annoying.

Hey mate - I'm going to tell you now, that a lot of the comments under this post are utter crap. Your grades are great, and even if you didn't go to a 'target uni' (a concept that doesn't really exist in Europe - HR just has a limited budget so likes to market to specific universities and courses, that's all) - you got a 2:1 which is all you need. Most initial HR screenings are automated - 2:1 passes through the gate (below that will get flagged to a HR person to review if you have mitigating circumstances). A cursory Google of your course title suggests you went to CASS/Bayes, which is a great university, so nothing to worry about there if that is the case. So now you've passed HR screening, you now need to pass the actual Teams' wants and needs. Your CV ultimately doesn't show what you'd be like in a team, nor how you would add value. Take your initial blurb about you - it's just buzz words, and doesn't quite make sense - how can you truly be results driven when you've not really had any experience? A better first sentence might be: "Ambitious and dynamic investment management graduate with a passion for financial markets and risk management, that will work hard to help teams better meet their clients' needs." Look at the banks you're applying for - write down their key competencies and then average them to find exactly what these banks look for (standard things usually - attention to detail, team player etc.) and then make sure every point in relates back to it..."Compiled qualitative and quantitative blah blah..." - make this a sentence about detail and accuracy, about stakeholder management, or convincing someone what you did was valuable. Don't just list what happened. Explain why it is meaningful. Think - does 'President and Founder of the AM Society" sound like an achievement compared to "Founded the led the AM Society at XXX University, bringing together students from across courses, managing events and bringing in key speakers"... Find a mentor - don't look to websites like this full of nobodies with their own agendas and prejudices. Good luck.

The main issue I can see is that you have quite the lack of experience. What you have listed in your experience during your summer analyst time is impressive, there’s no doubt about that, but it is the only finance related work experience I see.

This is going to put you at a major disadvantage for graduate programs because where I live there’s no shortage of people applying with 3+ finance related internships. Coming in with just 1 makes it pretty difficult simply to get an interview in my opinion.

Given your unfortunate situation, I would suggest that perhaps you can try applying for mid or back office jobs instead and work your way to the front office over the coming years. Alternatively, you can also consider applying to smaller and less well known places where you might not face as much competition.