Team Famous From IIM A Dazzles At IDFC FIRST Bank FAME Challenge

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Team Famous From IIM A Dazzles At IDFC FIRST Bank FAME Challenge

IDFC FIRST Bank is an Indian Private Sector Bank with a vision to build a world-class bank in India, guided by ethics and powered by technology. FAME was the first-ever national-level case study competition by IDFC FIRST Bank with a cash prize of INR 1.75L along with exciting PPI/ PPO opportunities up for grabs. The aim of the challenge is to give budding talent a platform to engage and ideate on real-world business problems. This enables them to interact and learn, alongside putting their classroom learnings to use. We- Aishwarya Balkhande, Het Shukla, and Bhavya Shah were excited to be associated with the brand and showcase our skills by solving the problems the bank faces.

Students (1st year and 2nd year) pursuing full-time 2-year MBA courses from the 26 B-Schools including our institute, IIM Ahmedabad were eligible for the competition. We went on to register for the competition and called ourselves Team Famous. And after grabbing the national winner title for the IDFC FIRST Bank FAME Challenge, we feel we have done justice to the name.

IDFC FIRST Bank FAME Competition Structure

The competition structure and organization were beyond amazing. Collectively we have won/reached the National Finals of 11 company & college competitions but this competition was by far the best in terms of the whole experience. The flow of the competition was as follows:

Round 1 - Case Submission
Round 2 - Detailed Presentation Submission
Round 3 - Grand Finale

We were allotted a mentor after clearing 1st round, and our mentor helped us a lot in getting better idea clarity. After 2nd round presentations, the jury from the round commented on improvement points which was an amazing value addition to the competition experience. The jury for the 3rd round (who were category heads) were also amazing listeners, that is, they were not just judging the presentation, but also listening to ideas and making observations along the way. This was evident from the questions they asked and the feedback they provided for every single slide. The grand finale was an all-day event filled with opportunities to network with the jury, management trainees, and the CEO. We loved every bit of the finale and made wonderful memories.

The Winning Approach

One thing that we feel helped us throughout the competition, is the fact that we are all very close friends. We all have distinct, yet complementary skills, that helped us immensely. Aishwarya is amazing with marketing, is very creative, and her impulses are pretty accurate. Het Shukla is a pro at strategy formulation and bringing all the pieces together. And Bhavya Shah handled the financials and all the product contours brilliantly. Our approach to solving the case was:

We all have one thing in common and that is our hunger for data. We conducted thorough research and covered everything that the internet had to provide to us, on this topic. We also referred to other sources of information like talking to competing banks etc.
Our team members had some experience in the banking industry and hence had an idea of how KMPs consider a proposal and what information they seek. And we tried to incorporate all of that in our solution.
We came up with the product, clearly identified the target segment, and also how we would target them.
We prepared our PPT starting with giving an overview of the industry, our suggested product, primary info, and GTM strategies, along with details on marketing & promotion.
We also included a working model of our solution as well as a detailed financial analysis/ report.

We worked a couple of hours every day on our submission for over 2 weeks, discussing every little detail & every strategy. While we were working on specific aspects of the solution, we'd always circle back to compile everything. It was great working with the team and the win validated all our efforts.

Check this out: Challenge Yourself With These B-school Competitions

Things We Learned From IDFC FIRST Bank FAME

The competition was a great learning experience and we learned something great from everyone, even our competitors. Some main learnings are:

How to make better slides & present them in a way that makes sense
How to network during and post a competition
How to talk to the top management of a company and take pointers to help model our outlook

A total of 10 teams made it to the finale. For us, the team from NMIMS was a primary competitor given they had done pretty much everything amazingly - the product idea, primary research through surveys, and talking with bank employees and users. We learned a lot from their approach and presentation.

Overcoming The Challenges

During the course of the competition, as any team would, we too faced our fair share of challenges. For other teams who are reading this, here is how we navigated through these challenges and came out on top:

When too much information poses a challenge- While conducting research for our solution, we also talked with the Director of a competing bank to get some more data. This led to an issue for us, in terms of having too much information and limited time to present it all. We solved this by pushing the details into annexures and adding headers to the main slides.
Another challenge was to talk with industry experts to get their opinion. Some of them were unavailable & some were unwilling to talk with a bunch of students.
It was also difficult to concentrate and work on the submission along with all the college requirements, especially at IIM A, as the schedule here is way too tight.

But we managed everything by taking a streamlined approach and managing our time to accommodate everything. We enjoyed great synergy among the three of us and hence were able to build an idea that was nearly exhaustive and foolproof.

A Few Final Words

The IDFC FIRST Bank FAME organization team took really good care of us, from booking flight tickets to the stay in a really amazing hotel. The thing we loved the most was the attitude of IDFC employees toward us. They treated us as equals, even in the Q&A session of the final presentation. The best moment of the competition for us has to be when they announced our team name as the winner. We just can't forget how it felt to win the IDFC FIRST Bank FAME Challenge. The CEO congratulated us and everybody was clapping. The whole experience was surreal, one that we will never forget it!

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