The SCB Future Leader Challenge (SCB FLC) is Thailand’s first business case competition for master’s degree students. It is jointly organized by Siam Commercial Bank and Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration of Chulalongkorn University, to promote learning and develop the potential of next generation’s leaders. This year, around 200 teams from global top universities, including Wharton, INSEAD and National University of Singapore, participated in the competition.

Our team, Xinpei Low (Singapore), Yoshihito Sato (Japan), Vivian Li (China) and Aaron Qi (China), decided that we had to be innovative and bold in our recommendations and substantiate them with detailed quantitative models. This, and our pitch, were well-received by the panel of judges, winning our team second place overall.

The competition was fast-paced and was a real-life learning platform for students. Participants were challenged by a team of judges, including top business leaders, industry experts and academic professionals. After a preliminary round of selection, 12 teams were invited to Thailand to conduct live cases, namely a 5-hour case, a 99-second pitch, a 24-hour case and a 20-hour final case. This year’s cases challenged contestants to develop solutions to enhance retail banking customer journeys and to address the e-commerce challenge facing department stores, among other issues. During this one-week period, our team made use of concepts and models that were delivered on the Cambridge MBA course, integrating them into our final recommendations.

Our team recollects the experience as follows:

“It was our team work that brought us this far. Our team was particularly multidisciplinary with members from finance, marketing and strategy consulting.  We continuously refined our ideas through intensive discussion that took various aspects into consideration. Without each member of our team, we could not have reached this level of novelty, depth and robustness.”
– Aaron Qi

“It was a good opportunity to reflect on and confirm what we had learnt through our classes and projects on the Cambridge MBA.”
– Yoshihito Sato

“One of the most challenging parts of the competition was the time constraints for the preparation of our solution for each case. However, we really appreciated this opportunity, since the scenarios were quite close to real life situations, and we are very happy that we came this far in this competition.”
– Vivian Li

“The competition helps to validate the applicability of frameworks and skills learnt on the Cambridge MBA. It guided our brainstorming and case solving process which led us to success.”
– Xinpei Low