Teams battle it out in Experian's SimRisk competition

Metro Bank crowned SimRisk champions

Beating teams including Sainsbury’s Bank, American Express and Close Brothers, Metro Bank finished narrowly ahead of JaJa Finance to win our popular acquisition strategy competition.

SimRisk challenges teams of up to five credit-risk professionals to make the most money by taking lending decisions on a fictitious portfolio of customers.

To make their decisions, the teams use Experian’s PowerCurve Strategy Management, and in particular the platform’s Assisted Strategy Design capability, which offers accessible analytics to help users build higher performing strategies.

Fun and fiercely competitive

The competition takes place over two online 90-minute sessions, led by our training consultant Jim Nowell. In the first round, the teams have to decide which of their ‘customers’ to accept and decline, while in the second they carefully choose the loan value and interest rate for those they’ve accepted.

It’s great fun, fiercely competitive and clients really enjoy making money – even if it’s not real. The first round is relatively simple, but real challenge comes in interpreting the figures to set the maximum loan amount. Some take a cautious approach by not lending too much in case it’s not paid back, while others are more ambitious in an attempt to make more money. PowerCurve is a powerful way to help them make those choices.

Jim Nowell, Senior Digital Learning Instructional Designer

The winners, Metro Bank, made £9.8m on their portfolio, while JaJa Finance finished just behind on £9.6m. Where both teams excelled was in making very effective decisions on those people they declined, while maximising the potential of customers they’d accepted.

Participants don’t have to have any prior knowledge of PowerCurve Strategy Management as training is provided. For those new to the platform, SimRisk is a great way to see how it can really benefit their companies. And even those who have worked with Strategy Management before always learn new ways to use it – knowledge they can take back into their business.

Congratulations to Metro Bank and all the teams who took part.

Have you got what it takes to win?

If you want to take part in our next SimRisk competition this autumn, you can register your interest by emailing us now.

What our participants told us:

“Competitive fun, that gave a break from normal work.”
“Learning about the software and using real life data to understand the impact of your decisions was really valuable.”
“Great teamwork activity.”