Two rounds of telephone intreviews, the first was a HR interview, the second was more technical, with math questions.
Personal interviews (two weeks later):
2 technical interviews, where we solved math problems
1 interpersonal interview, with HR
1 manager interview with executive directors
Most of the interviewers have PhD in math or physics so prepare to meet tough questions. If you are not familiar with linear algebra, statistics, probability, do not waste your/their time :)
The phone interviews and most of the personal interviews are in English.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me a situation where you had to work on multiple tasks.
Tell me about your educational background.
What is a swap? What are options?
I applied online. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Morgan Stanley (Budapest) in Mar 2013
Interview
I applied to the job on the homepage of MS. There was a phone interview some 20 days after application.
I was asked:
Why MS?
What does my recent studies and working for such a company has in common?
What programming experience I have?
What is my minimum expected salary?
What is the nearest date at which I could start my job?
Do I want to make a PhD?
There was only a phone interview yet, some questions were in my mother tongue (Hungarian), others were in English.
Technical phone interview:
I had one example:
1. You have two columns of random numbers. What is the correlation between them? A: 0
2. How would you create a third column that is correlated to the first? A: sum up the first two columns.
3. What will be the correlation between the first and third column given the first two columns have zero average and 1 is the standard deviation? A: Use the formulas listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence
I think I should have asked for more details at the separate questions as the interviewer was a Hungarian and didn't formulate some key features comprehensibly. It wasn't always clear what he wanted to ask.