The Series 79 (Investment Banking Representative) exam has 75 scored questions (plus 5 unscored), a 73% passing score, and a 150-minute limit. The fee is $395, and it requires firm sponsorship plus the SIE. Nearly half the exam is data collection, analysis, and valuation — it's the license for M&A, underwriting, and restructuring work, and one of FINRA's tougher representative exams.
The Series 79 registers you as an Investment Banking Representative — the qualification for advising on or facilitating debt and equity offerings (public or private), mergers and acquisitions, tender offers, financial restructurings, asset sales, and corporate reorganizations. FINRA created it in 2009 to carve investment banking out of the broad Series 7, so IB analysts and associates study material that actually matches their job.
Like all top-off exams it pairs with the SIE as a co-requisite and requires member-firm sponsorship via Form U4 — most banks enroll incoming analysts as part of onboarding, typically with a deadline and firm-specific consequences for failing. The scope boundary is worth knowing: the 79 covers advising and executing deals; if your role also involves actively marketing offerings to investors, the Series 7 may be required alongside it.
| Scored questions | 75 (plus 5 unscored pretest) |
| Time limit | 2 hours 30 minutes (150 minutes) |
| Format | Multiple choice, four options |
| Passing score | 73 (scaled) |
| Fee | $395 (non-refundable) |
| Prerequisites | SIE (co-requisite) + firm sponsorship (Form U4) |
| Delivery | Prometric center or online proctored |
FINRA organizes the exam around three job functions — and the first one is nearly half the exam:
| Function | ~Questions | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Collection, analysis & evaluation of data | 37 | 49% |
| 2. Underwriting / new financing, offerings & registration | 20 | 27% |
| 3. M&A, tender offers & financial restructuring | 18 | 24% |
Function 1 is the valuation core: financial statement analysis, comparable companies and precedent transactions, trading metrics, due diligence, and what you're allowed to communicate about it all. Function 2 runs the registration machinery — the Securities Act of 1933, exemptions (Reg D, 144A, Reg S), prospectus rules, and underwriting mechanics. Function 3 covers deal process: sell-side and buy-side M&A, fairness opinions, tender offer rules, and bankruptcy/restructuring. The math is real: multi-step accretion/dilution and valuation problems stuffed with extraneous data, where the tested skill is isolating what the formula actually needs.
It's one of FINRA's tougher representative exams, and the 73% passing bar — higher than the Series 7's 72 and the SIE's 70 — leaves little room for weak areas. What makes it hard isn't exotic content; working bankers know the concepts. It's that questions are long, scenario-based, and deliberately padded with data you don't need, under a two-minutes-per-question clock. The trap for experienced analysts runs the other way, too: the regulatory and registration material (Function 2) has no day-job equivalent, and it's where deal-fluent candidates most often fail.
Plan on 60–100 hours over 6–10 weeks. If you're a practicing analyst, weight your time toward securities registration and communications rules rather than the valuation you do daily. If you're entering from outside banking, the Function 1 analysis material is the long pole. Either way, banks typically set your exam date for you — so the study plan needs to work backward from a fixed deadline.
The classic Series 79 failure is a strong analyst who read the outline twice, felt fluent, and then couldn't produce Reg D thresholds or tender offer timelines from cold memory under the clock. Fluency while reading is recognition; the exam demands recall. The fix is retrieval practice on exam-style questions, spaced repetition timed to when you're about to forget, and immediate correction of every miss — especially the confident ones.
Trelos is built entirely around those techniques. It teaches each concept, drills it the way FINRA words it, and schedules your reviews so the rules stick — weighted toward the registration and deal-process material where the Series 79 is won or lost.
Start the Series 79 on Trelos — freeNo credit card. Feel the retention engine work in your first session.Once the SIE and Series 79 are both on file and your firm completes registration, you're an Investment Banking Representative. The registration stays active while you're employed at a member firm and generally lapses two years after you leave (extendable to five through FINRA's Maintaining Qualifications Program). Bankers moving into supervisory roles typically add the Series 24, the general securities principal exam.