For the second straight year, a student team from the David Eccles School of Business earned its way into the finals of the National Investment Banking Competition in Vancouver, Canada, besting hundreds of competing teams from around the world in the qualifying rounds to land a spot in the January case competition showdown.
A total of 250 teams vied in the qualifying round, and the top 24 Undergraduate and 16 MBA teams were chosen to continue to Canada. The U’s Undergrad team of Taylor Nielson, Kaitlyn Sanders, Benton Sturt and Bryce Whiting was one of only three teams from the United States to make the Underground section—alongside Notre Dame and Florida International University—where they faced off against teams stretching across Canada, as well as Singapore and Hong Kong.
“The National Investment Banking Competition gives students real investment banking problems to solve,” said Dr. Elizabeth Tashjian, director of the undergraduate Finance department. “NIBC gives our students the opportunity to meet, learn from and network with students from some of the top universities in the world. And the conference has judges and sponsors from industry who provide valuable feedback and create further professional networking opportunities. The pressure from the competition encourages our students to push themselves, and they learn that they can compete successfully with students from any program in the world.”
While the U team did not ultimately prevail, the experience of working on a realistic investment banking simulation under tight time constraints, and having their work judged by industry professionals, proved invaluable to the team members.
For the 2014 competition, the teams had to analyze whether Time Warner Inc. should acquire Lionsgate entertainment corporation, crunch the numbers and create an optimal financing structure of a deal and look at its impact on Time Warner’s financials and share price, make a recommendation on the transaction, and make a PowerPoint presentation of the deal to the board/competition judges. The teams had seven hours to work on the case, then spent a night honing their presentation for the next day in front of the judges.
“It was a great learning experience being put in an investment banking scenario where you must rely on your prior knowledge and teamwork to get through the transaction you’re given,” Sanders, a Finance junior from Salt Lake City, said of the experience. “We felt really good about our presentation and final numbers. However, after seeing the final presentations, we wished we had focused a little bit more on the PowerPoint, as well as thinking about the commercial implications of the transaction. We were right on with all the top schools, as well as the judges, in their numbers and their strategic thinking.”
Sanders particularly liked that “the actual competition was based on what you knew and your ability to work under pressure and think strategically. It was not about cramming for the material as much as it was about your own knowledge of business and finance as a whole that you bring from your years of schooling and work experience.”
Nielson, a senior from Riverton, Utah, majoring in Finance, said he enjoyed meeting other students from the Finance field, as well as the real-world look into the deal-making process. He hopes to work in investment banking as a career, and noted that the competition opened his eyes to the need for people of different skill sets being involved in finance projects.
“I would tell students thinking about competing to pick team members with different expertise sets,” Nielson said. “Don’t have a one-sided team! This really helped our team when putting together the transaction in the final round, giving us different points of view, especially when splitting up tasks.”
Whiting, a senior Finance major from The Woodlands, Texas, appreciated that the competition “served as a bridge between what I’ve been taught in the classroom and what to expect in the business world.” While the case was tough, he was proud the team’s numbers were “almost spot-on” with the case-solution booklet they received when the competition was over.
Whiting believes that any students considering the National Investment Banking Competition in the future should apply for the Student Investment Fund at the David Eccles School of Business. “That class in particular helped give us a competitive advantage over the other teams that didn’t make it to the finals,” he said.
“Although it was a very professional setting,” Whiting added, “we never lost our sense of humor, and I believe that is what kept us sane during the most challenging parts of the competition.”
Sturt, a Finance major from Salt Lake City, agreed that the value of participating in the NIBC was “how it prepares you for your career.
“The competition provides the students with strong experience that can be leveraged in interviews and in conversations with employers,” Sturt said. “These types of competitions are similar to internships in that they are really the closest that students can get to working in their field before graduating. The depth of the project, the understanding of the industry and company, the long hours and deadline crunches and the presentations are all thing that help set you apart from others as you look for career opportunities.”
Once the competition was over, the team got to network with other teams at a Vancouver club, and do a little touring of the city. The students also got to take part in the accompanying NIBC conference, which offered networking opportunities, workshops, and keynote speakers including Egizio Bianchini, vice chair of BMO Capital Markets, Andrew Sweeney, portfolio manager of Phillips, Hager & North Investment Management, Jim Gilliland, president and CEO of Leith Wheeler, and Clive Johnson, president and CEO of B2Gold Corporation.
