The HBCS Ranking does not stop- account of experiences of the K&H student cup
The final of the 5th K&D Student Cup took place on a sunshiny day at the end of November where our team, CorvinEquity took the second place. All three members of the team – Dávid Ferke, Attila Víg and myself, Viktor Kozma – found the competition to be both very challenging and useful.
The aim of the competition was to simulate the operation of a bank, to answer some actual finance questions and to give advice regarding them. In line with this the 286 teams first participated in a bank simulation during which we had to submit a decision table every week. We acted as the management of a bank and had the chance to decide on credit pricing, liability-side constructions and even on projects that were launched during the different periods, for instance starting a home savings bank. After the four decisions the teams with the highest result index made it through to the semifinal from each virtual markets, plus the two best teams that had taken second place.
The semifinal was s simulation again with a mechanism identical to the previous one, although obviously with stronger opponents. The positions of the different teams kept changing through the four rounds, in many markets the ranking went upside down in the last round so we were incredibly happy to make it into the final.
The 10 participating teams in the final that took place at K&H’s headquarters, had completely new waters to explore. Performance evaluation was along several dimensions as the teams had to present a previously prepared presentation besides solving a finance test at the spot and deliver a 90-seconds elevator pitch. The aim of the presentation was to explore the basic interrelations on the Hungarian savings market and to forecast it for the next 2-3 years. This task required substantial preparation as we had to analyze a market that had been relatively unfamiliar for us along several dimensions. It was especially difficult as the ten minutes that were available required us to present the results of our research in a very structured, coherent way. We enjoyed this part the most as we felt that there was an added value in what we had done as we managed to discover interesting connections. Besides that, the importance of teamwork was best demonstrated here which was absolutely successful and entertaining in our case.
The results of the competition were very close – there were only slight differences in points between the first three teams – which shows how highly-performing teams were competing for the main prize. Besides that I would like to emphasize that the atmosphere was great during the competition and the teams had a nice time at the final event which was characterized by perfect organization.
All in all I think that we learned a lot by participating in the competition as we had the chance to actively study the management and the actual challenges of the commercial banking sector. We were motivated to apply by our desire to try ourselves in a competition that have a different character from traditional case competitions. We can recommend next year’s competition to everyone who wants to participate in this high quality competition.
* Photo source: Facebook page of K&H Student Cup