ESSEC Team clinches 3rd place in BNP Paribas Ace Manager online business competition

An ESSEC Team comprising Ruochen Dai, ESSEC Global BBA student, Baiwen Gao, ESSEC Global BBA exchange student, and Zhaoyi Wu, ESSEC Global BBA student,  clinched 3rd place in the recently concluded BNP Paribas Ace Manager online business competition.

The BNP Paribas Ace Manager online business competition was held from April to June, with the finals taking place on 2 June 2016. Gathering around 12,000 contestants across 124 countries, the competition saw contestants working on a set of 10 cases in 3 weeks, with the top 10 teams participating in the finals. During the finals, teams worked on a financial case study related to BNP Paribas’ core business areas, and presented the vision of future banking integrated with Fintech and digitalization.

Baiwen Gao tells us more about his experience of participating in the competition, “This Spring semester, I teamed up with two other ESSEC students to participate in the BNP Paribas Ace Manager online business competition and we came in third place. The competition was demanding, with 10 financial cases within 3 weeks, which was an average of one case per 2-3 days and we had to learn to manage this together with our regular schoolwork. We thus adopted a divide-and-combine strategy, where we divided the jobs and finished them, after which we discussed and verified our answers. In order to complete our submissions well, we worked quite late everyday, learning about finance concepts and trying to get the answers for all questions. Although this process was challenging, it was the part that I enjoyed the most, however, because I could feel that I was learning and everything I was doing would pay off afterward. The most important lesson I have learned from this competition is how to be a good team player who is supportive and understands that every competition requires commitment in order to be able to achieve success.” 

The top three teams received cash prizes, and for three consecutive years, BNP Paribas has offered all the finalists a broad range of international internship opportunities in one or more of the Group’s two core business areas.