I have been offered a job on the graduate progrmme. I know Lloyds reputation is mainly in the retail side, but beleive they are planning to build the invesment banking and markets depts in the future. I know they do FX, IR trading and have read that they have a quant dept also. Any ideas of other desks they have and which dept or sector I should target.

For years the Chair / CEO of Lloyds loathed the idea of being an investment bank - the whole culture just put them off. Instead, they decided to be a retail bank, and in the mid to late 1990s, they were really rather good at it and made a shed load of money from the High StreetThey do have a few investment bank bits'n'bobs - they've usually been competent at vanilla FX, particularly spot. I've heard rumours about them wanting to leverage the synergies from having large corporates as cusomters for day-to-day banking stuff (e.g paying cheques, cash management, etc), and sell them inv bank things. However, I think it's going to take a very long time based on organic growth for Lloyds to make it to anywhere near the medium sized league, unless they go buy themselves an investment bank. Rumours have abounded for years they might merge with eithe ABN Amro or DeutscheMake of it what you will - but in ur first 18 months, try to get as much experience as u possibly can of as many different products - it'll stand u in good stead for the future