A - A pretty numerical mindset. Sit in front of their computers all day. Know their processes inside-out.

B - Perhaps not formally trained, but working with data, Bloomberg extracts, a self-taught sense in normalising data.

C - If there's an Excel function that saves time, they know it. This also leads to trader-as-a-developer with personal VBA scripts as that's good enough and there's an IDE in Excel that doesn't need layers of approval to use (which is obviously a disaster) - this also means thinking "If I can do this in Excel in a day, why does it need a development team of 5 to do in a month?"

D - Fast turn-around. That means keeping on top of messages, dates, calendar. And a sense of prioritising this without needing a system to do it. And messages pumped through mail, phone, BBM, conversations all tied together.

E - Don't want to be Nick Leeson and have a grudging acceptance that compliance and audit is a thing.

F - Except when they don't.

Contrast that to typical clerical roles where these things are somewhat 'slower paced' and doing things with Excel/following-up emails becomes a disaster - not in all cases, but in many.

All BAs I know in banking/finance are exceptional communicators that get through points A-F above.