Making finance more popular to the students

Widely known in the competition arena for their flagship events such as Corporiddlerz and CreADive, Bangladesh University of Professionals Business and Communication Club (BUP BCC) has recently introduced the first-ever finance and accounting based competition 'LankaBangla Finance Presents Intra Finatrics 2018'. Starting from number crunching to full-fledged financial analysis, this new competition was designed to test one's financial capabilities to the core.

However, Finatrics was not only about analysing the quantitative results but rather a significant part of the competition involved making sustainable investment decisions backed by strategic data.

Sponsored by LankaBangla Finance Limited, the competition was initially launched on an intra-university scale, with a total of 160 home teams from all the different departments. Out of these, only 30 successful teams made it through the online screening round which was based on the concept of BUY & SELL with regard to company product portfolio.

The screening round was followed by the second round where the 30 teams were given an on-spot case to solve and come to an investment decision. The GAMBIT, a surprise task in the first round, sure hit the contestants by surprise when they were asked to derive a budget breakdown for an interactive marketing campaign. For a first-time attempt, it was amazing to see all the teams complete the surprise task with utmost professionalism and teamwork before they could present their entire solution up on stage. After a rigorous judging process, the top five teams who made it through to the grand finale were Team Mudblood, Team Fishfins, Team Invictus, Team Almost There and Team Shelby Company Limited.

The grand finale was held on March 23, 2018 at Bijoy Auditorium in Bangladesh University of Professionals (BUP) in the presence of pro vice-chancellor of BUP, Dr. M Abul Kashem Mozumder who was the chief guest of the event. Kazi Masum Rashed, executive vice president, Credit Risk Management, Lanka Bangla Finance Limited was present as the special guest of the event. The panel of judges constituted of top-tier personnel from various financial institutions.

The team, claiming the champion title of the first-ever Intra Finatrics 2018, was Team Almost There. The first and second runners-up were Team Fishfins and Team Invictus respectively. The winning teams were awarded with prize money of Tk 25,000, Tk 15,000, and Tk 5,000 respectively.

When sharing their Finatrics 2018 experience so far, Farhan Ishmam Sikder from the champion team said, "Guess we kept on telling ourselves that we are almost there and look where that got us! Alhamdulillah."

While marketing and socio-economic completions are dominant in the arena, it is undeniable that finance and accounting too are crucial elements in the corporate world. Even if these kinds of competitions are somewhat new in nature, they can be beneficial as a source of learning and as a form of gearing for the contestants.

Emphasising on the importance of finance-based competitions, the president of BUP Business and Communication Club, Mahadi Billah said, "It goes without saying that the introduction of Finatrics has created a huge impact on the students of BUP in terms of their focus on honing their financial abilities and realising the huge scope in the finance sector."

The youth engagement partner of the event was the Financial Express. After the successful completion of the intra phase, the club plans to take it to the next level by launching Inter Finatrics soon.

The writers are third year students of BBA in Accounting and Information Systems and BBA in Marketing (respectively) at Bangladesh University of Professionals (BUP). They can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected]