In Other News: Conquering Corporate Competitions Again
Part 2: In conversation with the winners of some prestigious competitions
A quick introduction before we begin: You will hear from us every Monday and Friday at 9 am on the dot. The newsletter has 2 segments- one covers all things personal finance and the other is a miscellaneous (read: chaotic) college-related collective. Monday’s newsletter, titled ‘Our two cents’, is dedicated to personal finance and this is where we divulge our college-centric take on the subject of saving, budgeting, investing, and the like. Friday’s newsletter, titled ‘In other news’, covers just about everything else- from research papers to student loans to so much more. And with that out of the way….
Hi there! Top of the morning to you. It’s that time of the week again. In today’s edition, we talk to some incredible people who have participated in and won prestigious competitions. Without further ado, let’s dive into it.
📨 A little context
A couple weeks ago, we covered a few highly talked about competitions and what the winners of these competitions have to say about what set them apart. We received overwhelmingly good feedback and thought we’ll do a part two. Today, we’re covering HSBC Business Case Program, Deloitte GSM, and EY CAFTA Case Championship. Let’s get started.
🔍 The focus
#1 HSBC Business Case Program
Competition Overview
Organiser: HSBC and Sattva Consulting in India
The HSBC/HKU Asia Pacific Business Case Competition is HSBC’s flagship Future Skills Project in APAC. It is the world’s largest business case competition for undergraduate students from select colleges, that aspires to build future skills by encouraging students to come up with creative and feasible solutions to real-world business cases. Students are asked to participate in teams of 4.
In Conversation with the Winner
Winners: Ananya Kumar and Aakarshi Agarwal
College: Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi University
How was the competition structured and how did you go about each of the rounds?
Broad Competition Structure:
Registration Form (video submission included)
Test (Intra-college)
Inter-college Round
National Semi-finals
Learning and Development sessions for the top 4 teams by HSBC & Sattva professionals
National finals ( the top 2 teams make it to the Global round)
Breakdown:
Registration Form: The form takes about 2 hours to fill. It asks for participant details, the supporting faculty member’s details, and a video covering team introduction along with why they chose to take part in the HSBC Case Competition, and why they should be chosen for the finals. The participants also have to submit their CVs at this stage. It is advisable to start filling the form and saving details well in advance before the deadline as it is quite exhaustive. It’s also best to keep your updated CV handy.
Pro tip: Use video editing skills for the team introduction video. Make sure each team member highlights their personal brand, past experience and how their goals align with that of the Case Competition. Also make sure to highlight the diversity and different skills sets of the team members.
Aptitude Test: The online aptitude test covers Verbal, Quantitative Analysis, Data Interpretation and Logical Reasoning questions. The test isn’t all too difficult and is similar in nature to the questions one may see during the online test rounds in internships for instance. It’s important to brush up on these type of questions and some commonly used formulae before appearing for the test. During the test, optimally divide questions among team members to effectively time manage. Around 32 teams move to the next round.
Inter-college Case Submission Round: The teams are given 6 hours to go through the case study (which is around 40 pages), create handwritten PPT slides, and a 20-minute Video Pitch to present the case solution. Time management during these 6 hours of case discussion and submission is extremely crucial but challenging. Our case was based upon building a GTM model around the solar industry. A tip for this round would be to come up with disruptive and innovative out-of-the-box solutions to the case problem. Use Excel Analysis and focus heavily on data as Q&A questions later on could be based on the data points and your approach. Try to keep the handwritten slides as uniform as possible and minimally aesthetic. Only two members worked on the visuals of the slides, while the other two worked on the research and content to present. This helped us maintain slide uniformity.
National Semi-finals: This is a very short round wherein the top 8 teams from the previous round present their videos to a panel of judges. This is followed by a Q&A round that lasts for about 15 minutes.
Learning and Development Sessions: The L&D Sessions conducted by leading industry professionals are very useful, make sure you attend all of them.
National Finals: The Case submission round is similar to the previous one (6 hours) but no video has to be submitted in this round. Our case was based on the Walmart-Bharti deal that took place in 2006 and why it did not work out. Focus on the approach and flow of the PPT. Do ensure that your approach is strong as this round gives you the freedom to elaborate on the same when you present your case solution to the judges on D-day. Make sure the PPT ppt is crisp and to the point with multiple data visuals as there is scope for detailed explanation later on. You are given approximately 20 minutes to pitch your solution. Develop a good storyline to keep the judges hooked, be confident while answering the questions asked in the Q&A round, make sure you have facts and statistics to back your answers and arguments.
Final thoughts
An interesting realization we had during the two cases was that the HSBC team does not give very direct cases with questions at the end that they expect the teams to answer. Participating teams are expected to read the case study and identify gaps and the questions that they need to find solutions to themselves.
FAQ
What is an ideal solution structure when it comes to the HSBC Case Competition?
For HSBC, we used a fiver-tier structure which contained the following:
Overview
Analysis
Solution
Implementation
Impact
This structure helped us frame our solution in a coherent manner. For the analysis part, a financial analysis could be used. A risk analysis could be used in the implementation section of the solution structure. It’s important to include numbers in the impact section. The frameworks one would use varies from case to case. Instead of restricting yourself to set frameworks and structures, you could create your own framework too, based on the nitty-gritty of the case. This was one practice that worked for us and enabled us to emerge as the first runners-up in this year’s HSBC India Business Case Competition.
#2 Deloitte Graduate School Maverick
Competition Overview
Organiser: Deloitte
Graduate School Maverick (GSM) aims to connect with the potential future workforce of Deloitte by offering a platform for students to actively interact and compete with like-minded individuals, while embracing different perspectives. Through this competition, students are given an opportunity to experience a real-world problem where they can use their skills and creativity to collaborate and provide unconventional and sustainable solutions.
In Conversation with the Winner
Winner: Janvi Gupta
College: Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi University
How was the competition structured and how did you go about each of the rounds?
Aptitude: The first round after registration was an online aptitude test which consists of basic quant and logical reasoning questions. I didn’t prepare for this one because it wasn’t very difficult and I don’t think there was a very high cutoff for the aptitude. You could brush up your basic math concepts if you want to be sure of clearing this round.
Round 2: After the aptitude test, we got a shortlist of 8 people from LSR and they asked us to form 2 teams of 4 people each. We had to submit our resume and also decide on a name for the team. This is an important step because we later found judges asking us for the rationale behind choosing that particular team name and we believe our answer complemented our presentation. After you’ve submitted details, Deloitte sends you a list of problem statements to choose from. We had three:
Digital future of Audit and Assurance
Hybrid work model in public accounting firms
Integration of ESG into auditing
We chose hybrid work model as the problem statement to work on. Make sure you have a logical reasoning for choosing a particular problem so you can back it up in case you’re asked. They had structured this round in the following manner:
2 checkpoints with mentors assigned
Some business sessions for the participants
Submission of the deck
Final presentation in front of the judges
The team are evaluated on the basis of their interactions with the mentors and the final presentation. One thing that we believe set us apart from the start was that we valued the checkpoints just as much as the final presentation. For checkpoint 1, we had to talk about our strategy and plan of action to research on the case and come to a logical conclusion. So, we spent some time breaking our research down into buckets and made a whole structure on Miro to visually walk them through our plan. We then had a week or two before the next checkpoint, so we contacted over 200 professionals from the big 4 firms to get insights into how working conditions are at accounting firms, how comfortable were they with the hybrid work model, and what problems they think they’re going to encounter if this becomes a norm. When it was time for checkpoint 2, we had a broad idea of how things worked at accounting firms and what the pain points were. We went ahead formulated a bunch of questions for the mentors to see if the solutions we were thinking of were implementable. A few things that went well during our mentor interactions were that we kept the mentors engaged throughout the call, each one of us had a lot of questions about the industry and our problem statement so that showed curiosity to learn, and we valued their feedback and incorporated their suggestions. Then came our final presentation.
We wanted our solution and presentation to tell a story so we started with an analysis of our survey and then used numbers to emphasise on the intensity of the problem.
We made use of the public research papers that Deloitte and other accounting firms release on their websites to lay down the steps that are already in place.
We then highlighted the gaps in the current methods and suggested an innovative approach.
To think of a creative solution, we worked around an app design that was a one-stop platform covering the changes we wished to bring about.
Lastly, we paid a lot of attention to our deck where we used Deloitte’s color palette to connect with them better and kept the text as minimal as possible without compromising on the clarity of solution. Additionally, we attended all of their business sessions in between and incorporated the things we learned from them.
I believe final presentation is always a mix of your solution, the delivery and Q/A. We all tried to be really confident during the Q/A and I believe that worked well for us.
Round 3: We made it to round 3 as top 20 teams. We had to choose another problem statement from the 3 statements they gave initially. We went ahead with ESG this time. We mostly followed the same strategies as the second round. The core foundation of our solution was to think of something creative yet feasible. We created our own matrix that could be used to make ESG auditing easier. We also watched a lot of case winning videos to make our PPT more appealing.
Pre-Finale: Deloitte selected 10 teams for the offline finale in Hyderabad. A week before Hyderabad, we all got a common problem statement about diversity and inclusivity in accounting firms and we could use any medium to express our thoughts on it. We made a video with a very diverse set of people from our college to know what DEI means to them and created a story around it. We presented this on our first day in Hyderabad. The major focus was on Q/A and I think the best part about our team was how coordinated we all were and how we would add on to each other’s answers. There would be a lot of to-and-fro sometimes but in those cases, if we believed in what we said, we would hold our point. If at all we felt what the judges said made more sense, we did not hesitate to admit it and thanked them for giving a different perspective.
Finale: 5 teams were selected for the live round where we were given 2-3 hours to work on a problem statement around sustainability. We presented it in front of 5 judges and had a round of Q/A with them. I think this wasn’t our best performance but what helped us win was probably how confident and calm we were in handling the questions and objections raised. Additionally, we used a lot of Deloitte GSM references to break down the problem of sustainability at the level of a 3-day competition. This was about it. We were declared the second runner’s up and received a cash prize of ₹50,000.
Final thoughts
The last thing that I’d like to mention is that this competition is used as a way to recruit interns. Although you’re participating in a team, they judge you individually and choose interns from the whole cohort.
#3 EY CAFTA Case Championship
Competition Overview
Organiser: Ernst & Young
EY CAFTA Case Championship is a national-level case study competition organized for college students across India. Participants can choose 1 or more streams out of 4 to participate in, where they’ll be upskilled and then expected to solve the stream case study given to them by proposing strategic corporate actions backed up with in-depth research of the organization and market conditions.
In Conversation with the Winner
Winner: Aakarshi Agarwal
College: Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi University
How was the competition structured and how did you go about each of the rounds?
EY CAFTA is one of the newest corporate case competitions for undergraduate students and primarily focuses on areas related to finance, treasury and consulting. Here, EY really focuses on learning and development of participants and provides them with comprehensive study material and videos. It consists of 3 stages - registration, online test and case and video submission round.
Registration Round: In the first stage, students are to make one of the most important decisions pertaining to the competition i.e. to decide the domain of the competition under which they'd like to contend. As mentioned earlier, the domains revolve mainly around areas related to finance, treasury and consulting. Out of the 4 domain options, I chose Global Financial Markets. It's very important for students to take a prudent decision here, as top 5 students form each domain are declared as winners and top 3 students of each domain are conferred a scholarship on EY's Certification in Applied Finance, Treasury and Analytics and a summer internship opportunity in EY's Financial Services and Risk Management sector. Clearly, the benefits are immense and choosing a domain of your interest will give you an edge over others.
You also have the option to participate individually or in a team of 2. I would suggest participants who are good team players to go for the team option as there are many benefits to it, but otherwise, individual participation can also be extremely rewarding for people who like to take sole ownership of the case provided in the competition.
Online Test: In the 2nd stage, participants are provided with videos and study material related to their domain. The study material is very diligently curated with simple explanations and tons of illustrations. The material is provided much before the online test in order to provide all students with a level-playing field, which is something unique to EY CAFTA and certainly makes it more inclusive and accessible than most other competitions. At this stage, I recommend going through the study material thoroughly and making your own notes while watching the videos. The videos are extremely helpful as EY Professionals themselves explain not-so-common financial concepts in common terms. If you are participating in a team, you can cover the vast amount of material by dividing topics amongst yourselves and sharing notes with each other- one of the benefits of participating in a team.
The test is scheduled well in advance so that students get enough time to prepare. For people participating in a team of 2, both the participants are allowed to give the test individually and the higher of the 2 scores is accepted- another benefit of participating in a team. The questions of the test are objective and from the study material itself, so if one has thoroughly covered the whole material they shall be able to answer most of the questions correctly.
Case and Video Submission Round: Students are expected to answer a 3-4 questions provided in the case study. The case study is usually built in a setup wherein the participants are expected to put themselves in the shoes of an EY consultant and provide solutions accordingly. At this stage, my team mate and I researched about the industry and deliberated upon the case for hours. We wanted to ensure that we understood each aspect of the case and provided a unique solution. Once we had done a thorough research, we focused a lot on data and analytics. We used data visuals in our PPT and provided an Excel analysis of fund allocation. For the video pitch, we chalked out an exhaustive script of the video so as to cover the whole case in the 3-minute time limit.
FAQ
How to stand out in your candidature?
The EY CAFTA Competition provides a lot of scope to stand out in your candidature:
PPT: The basic rules for a good PPT are- PPT title/color scheme same as that of organizing company, and the structure of the solution should ideally be in the way the 3-4 questions are listed in the case document. However, participants should storyline their solution in order to make all the flow of the answers look coherent.
Video: The basic rules for a good video are: a plain white wall as a background, and formal attire. Video editing skills can be put to good use. We edited the video by writing short texts as subtitles and put the logos of all the companies used as examples in our case solution to keep it more appealing.
Others: While I was participating in EY CAFTA, the Google form had a separate question asking us to add any relevant documents that we may have along with our solution. My teammate and I made good use of this opportunity to stand out. We submitted a financial analysis in Excel (the analysis was based on the data provided in the case) and also submitted a Google data studio dashboard link to show the excel analysis in the form of Data Visualization. This additional detailing really secured us some brownie points.
👋🏻 Bye-bye
………Aaand that’s a wrap. See you Monday :) Of course, we can correspond earlier if you have feedback or a topic you want us to cover. Feel free to use the comment section or write to us at witmeup.in@gmail.com. Alternatively, you can anonymously provide your valuable feedback here. Thanks, and toodles!