Banking and finance law postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

I graduated with an LLB in 2017 and, rather than moving straight into practice, took a job in a bank's lending support team because I needed the income and wanted to see how commercial agreements behave once they leave the file. Eight years later that decision has shaped what I want to study. I have spent most of my working life reading facility letters, security documents and guarantees written by other people, and explaining their consequences to customers who did not always understand what they had signed. I now want to return to the law properly and study banking and finance law at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate interests pointed this way before I recognised it. My final-year dissertation examined the doctrine of undue influence in relation to spousal guarantees over the family home, working from Royal Bank of Scotland v Etridge (No 2) and the practice it produced. Writing it taught me how much of banking law is really about allocating risk between parties of very unequal information, and how courts use quite old equitable ideas to do modern commercial work. In my job I later saw the other end of that process: a checklist requiring independent legal advice, applied consistently, sometimes thoughtfully and sometimes not. Seeing the rule operate as an administrative step rather than a principle made me want to understand how regulation is designed, and why it drifts.

My work has given me a practical grounding that I think will be useful in seminars. Handling arrears cases meant working within the FCA's consumer credit rules and treating customers fairly requirements, distinguishing regulated agreements from unregulated business lending, and recognising when a security interest had not been registered properly. I have dealt with the consequences of a floating charge crystallising, with set-off across accounts, and with insolvency practitioners asking for documents we could not always produce. None of this made me a specialist, but it did teach me that the law of taking security is mostly the law of what happens when things go wrong, and that documentation quality matters more than any single clause.

Over the past year I have prepared deliberately for returning to study. I worked through Hudson's textbook on the law of finance, concentrating on the chapters on syndicated lending and on the regulatory architecture created after the financial crisis, and read Ellinger's Modern Banking Law on the banker-customer relationship, which sharpened my sense of how much of that relationship remains contractual beneath the regulation. I have also followed the debates around ring-fencing and the senior managers regime, partly because colleagues discussed them without much clarity about where the obligations actually came from. To rebuild academic discipline I completed a short online course on financial markets and have kept a reading notebook, forcing myself to summarise arguments rather than simply agree with them.

Outside work I volunteer with my local credit union, mostly staffing an information stall at community events and helping with the annual general meeting paperwork. It is modest work, but it has shown me how a small, member-owned deposit-taker experiences prudential requirements very differently from a large bank, and I would like to look seriously at proportionality in financial regulation.

I am applying part-time so that I can continue working, and I expect the adjustment to sustained academic writing to take effort. I am particularly keen to study secured transactions, international finance documentation and the regulation of credit institutions in a setting where I can test my practical assumptions against the scholarship. Longer term I intend to qualify and work in banking regulatory or transactional practice, bringing an unglamorous but genuine familiarity with how these arrangements function day to day.

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