About the competition

The Double’s main objective is to bring together the best students from the most prestigious business schools in Europe by giving them the opportunity to meet high talented professionals in a testing, defiant, but fun atmosphere. The competition itself which involves studying cases, analyzing data, and decision making, will help establish open communication between the participants and the external facilitators creating an extraordinary learning opportunity.

EVENT

The event will be hosted at HEC Paris from April 30th to May the 4th. One hundred and twenty participants, from the 17 CEMS business schools in Europe, will take part in the challenge; these outstanding students will be divided into two main groups: Investment Banking and Management Consulting. In each of these two groups, 10 teams of 6 members each will be formed (20 teams in total). Care will be taken to ensure that all the teams are formed through combining participants from different schools and backgrounds.

During the four days of the event, diverse activities will be carried out in order to offer the participants a unique and enriching experience. As a starting point, a “team building” session will take place enabling the students to get to know each other by dealing with interactive and integrating tasks which will require both physical and intellectual abilities.

ROUND 1: Consulting Management and Investment Banking

On the second day of the event, the competition really begins, and the 20 teams will have to be ready to accept the challenge. Management Consultancy and Investment Management competition participants will be separated and take part in simultanuously-run one-day competitions.

The Consulting Competition
The Consulting Game will consist in a business simulation. During the simulation, teams of participants, each representing a company, compete against each other on a market defined by the simulation situation.  The managers of these companies (the team members) make periodical decisions concerning their business which encompass the areas included in the simulation package.  In their decisions they must take into account the rules of the market defined by the game (size of the market, available products, human and financial resources) as well as other diverse constraints imposed by the changing environment (legal, cultural, economic, technological, human, etc.).
The RIT Investment Banking Competition
The RIT Investment Banking competition will start with an ‘Open outcry’ followed by a ‘Sales & Trader case’. The Open Outcry market is meant as an "icebreaker" event during which everyone will be trading a single index futures contract. A live news feed will affect the underlying index and consequently, the futures prices. Participants will be able to trade futures contracts with one another via an outcry system. The Sales & Trader case stresses the on-the-spot decision making process that liability traders must execute when competing to fill orders arriving from buy-side institutions. Traders will transact multiple securities on an electronic market with one another, in an attempt to generate the most profits from liquidity trading and commission based order filling. This case will be broken up into two heats with two representatives from each team competing in each heats.
Let the game begin!

In the given time frame each team must make optimal use of their resources and under considerable time pressure develop their recommended solution. Best use of available resources will be a key factor in selecting the winning team. Throughout the contest, mentors will rotate and give advice to each group. This will allow the participants to get to know the different approaches that each company has when it comes to problem solving. It will also be a great opportunity for participants to meet all the professionals involved at least once and demonstrate their capabilities, and their team’s ability.

Both Management Consultant and Investment Banking teams will work on their assignments during one day before heading to the second round.

ROUND 2: Joint Double Competition

Day 3; this will be the second and final competition and involve combined teams of investment bankers and management consultants. The twenty teams from the previous day will be combined to create 10 teams of twelve candidates. Each team will consist of 6 consultants working with the equivalent number of bankers. In this round the challenge will be to solve an M&A case that will present some very special challenges both of analysis and decision making. The joint team will have to take into account both consultancy and financial perspective on the issue and come up with a recommendation. In order to succeed in the last round, strong teamwork will be crucial as well as innovative and efficient recommendations. However it will be the quality of the recommendations that determine the winner.

At the final gala dinner with professionals and faculty members, three winning teams will be announced: a consultancy, a banking, and a joint winning one. The winning teams will be chosen by a panel jury composed by prominent members of the academic and business world.