Our Curriculum

For 10 days a year over the course of three years, students learn:

• Year 1- Head of Retail Perspective: Focusing on how to manage the retail segment of a bank. This includes sessions on how to acquire, segment and retain customers, design and price products and how to effectively tailor marketing messages.
• Year 2 - CFO & CRO Perspective: Focusing on concepts for managing a bank’s profitability. This includes sessions on how to analyze financial data to measure future performance, and how to assess and manage risk.
• Year 3 - CEO Perspective: Focusing on managing a bank from the top down. This includes sessions on how to consider analysts’ recommendations, how to structure a merger and how to evaluate key economic indicators.

Our exclusive curriculum unfolds not from a textbook at a lecture podium, but during high-energy, interactive, competitive exercises. Students work in small groups. They adopt different roles and responsibilities common at a bank. They collaborate, debate, experiment. And it all takes place while being immersed in state-of-the-art virtual experiences designed by our faculty of leading industry experts. 

MarketSim is a one-of-a-kind simulation that challenges a small team to run the entire consumer business for the bank. Students take responsibility for one of four roles: Chief Retail Officer, Marketing Officer, Product Management Officer or Delivery Officer. They analyze the current status of the retail bank and formulate a strategy to attract market share.  To do so, they have to decide which customer segments to target, hold, or drop, which products to off­er to appeal to those target segments and how to price them accordingly, which delivery channels would optimize the target demographics, and how to most effectively tailor branding and marketing messages. Success is measured both by traditional financial statements and by a balanced scorecard, which tempers the lagging indicators represented by the financials with the leading indicators of non-financial data such as cross-sell penetration and customer retention rates. Results are based on actual market data and pricing elasticity curves generated by Novantas.

BankCom requires the students to manage the whole bank from the top down.  This is a state-of-the-art banking simulation that moves beyond measuring success from a pure income statement snapshot.  It replicates the real-world necessity of factoring in risk through economic value of equity, presenting a true picture of the potential for longer-term profitability.  It is also unique in taking analyst recommendations into account when calculating shareholder value.  Each student within the small team takes responsibility for a role:  CEO, Chief Risk Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer, Chief Deposits Officer, and Chief Lending Officer.

These simulations allow students to gain firsthand experience in a no-risk environment before they go back to implement their key learnings in the actual bank.

But it doesn’t end in the classroom. After the first- and second-year sessions, students take on a home study assignment that challenges them to further apply their new knowledge in their own bank. This pushes your bank officers to collaborate with other departments in their bank and propose fresh cost-saving or profit-making ideas.

Ours is the only program nationally that provides the holistic view of retail banking and tools for sound decision-making that are critical to effective management in our evolving industry.