How to crack the Bajaj Finserv case study?
With this piece, we take a look at how to crack the Bajaj Finserv case study competition. We take a look at the thought process of the National finalists and finally the suggestions you should keep in mind.
The monsoon had already arrived in the cleanest city of our country last August. The cloud cover, evening drizzle and sweet breeze made that evening at Planet-I a sleepy and lazy affair. Suddenly an e-mail notification appeared on my smartphone screen and found out the Bajaj Finserv Atom Season 2 case competition registration deadline. The mandatory registration didn’t allow me to ignore that and go for a pleasant nap
We took Arunabha, Harshit in the team, then I contacted Anwesha and she agreed to be the fourth team member. Time was to decide the team name and I scratched my head for a while. It was a finance-based case competition and we had excellent team members. I surely wanted a catchy name and I decided ‘Fintastic’ as our team name. It comprised of Arunabha Banik – ‘The IT Wizard’, Anwesha Mukherjee – ‘The Fin Queen’, Harshit Sinha – ‘The Intelligent Investor & Workhorse’ and me – ‘The All-Rounder’.
The Campus Final Round
There were four problem sets given along with video descriptions for each problem. We chose ‘the future of healthcare and health insurance in India’ to work upon. Apart from that, there were one investment-related problem, e-payment & transaction problem and a credit issuance related problem. We downloaded the Atom app and registered our team.
As the term 4 ended we went back to our homes to spend a vacation with our friends and families. I was having a great time binge-watching a Netflix web series and I checked my mail inbox in between two episodes with Maggie noodles in my mouth. “Oh No! We have only one day left to submit our solution!” I exclaimed in surprise.
I called my team members. We started studying the Indian insurance sector and understood that it was a pretty small part of our GDP. Moreover, we saw the majority of insurance was covered by Govt.
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The Ideation of the Bajaj Finserv case study
Our aim was to give a futuristic solution using IoT and digital devices in healthcare. We found that people got insurance benefit only when they fell sick or hospitalized with certain diseases. Also, delay in insurance payment, large premium discouraged people to take health insurance.
We decided our app-based solution would act as a pre-emptive personalized health consultant to the customers to take care of their health 24×7 to prevent sickness as well as provide seamless health and insurance assistance during sickness. This would enhance better connection and relationship with customers bringing all the stakeholders of the ecosystem such as hospitals, doctors, pharma companies, path labs, fitness experts etc. together in one platform.
This solution enabled greater business prospect by acquiring a huge set of customers with customized offerings and non-insurance health support. This would also reduce sickness resulting less no. of claims and would open up secondary sources of revenue triggering overall revenue growth for the company.
Finally, we decided app-based “Connected Insurance Ecosystem“ leveraging technology such as IoT, Blockchain to onboard all the stakeholders. Harshit wrote the description in details and sent me. I prepared a short video pitch. Anwesha chipped in with the creation of the slides. We got a few investments on our solution before the deadline. A few days later we were astonished to know we became campus finalists with another team.
We reached to our campus and sat in the group to discuss in detail about expanding the content for campus finals round with the addition of background study, market and competitor analysis, implementation plan, Go-to-Market strategy and financials.
Our campus final round went well and we emerged campus winners!!
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The Regional Finals
“Ab to jitna muskil hain” a worried voice of Harshit proved that we were vying with top teams from IIM Calcutta, XLRI Jamshedpur, XIM-Bhubaneshwar, IIM Shillong and MDI Murshidabad in Eastern region. On top of that, we found ourselves at the bottom of Market Value ranking owing to lack of investment. This made our chances of making into national rounds gloomier. I sent out an email to both the PGP batches to invest in our team to increase our chances of winning and represent our institute in the National Finals.
To our sheer delight IIM I community listened to our appeal and many people invested in us. We had to give a detail presentation within 20 minutes of time limit during regional rounds. Further details were added in financials, go-to-market strategy, competitor analysis and implementation roadmap part.
“Hey!! You guys have only 5 minutes to complete the presentation” interrupted one jury in a heavy voice who was not visible during the video presentation in Regional round. I saw the sweat in Harshit’s forehead. I hurried through my part of the presentation in anxiety and Arunabha quickly came in for the most important part of our presentation. With his effortless confidence and expert looking narration with the detail he nailed his part. Time was up but the jury allowed us to complete the remaining financial portion where Anwesha participated.
The Q&A
The Q&A part saw us describing some new concepts we learned in one of the courses which completely took the judges by surprise. Once again Arunabha was spot on with his explanation. Anwesha showed why she is expert in Finance with her crisp answer.
We highlighted the fact that how our solution took care of the problem statement requirements with ease of implementation and financial viability. The solution also allowed easy expansion opportunities in upcoming days by onboarding new stakeholders and offering new services.
Bingo!! We were declared regional winners after 2 days and we were heading to Pune for National Finals.
Finally, the National Finals
The driver in uniform forwarded his right hand for a handshake to be greeting us in a warm voice “Good Morning Sir! Welcome to Pune.” We certainly felt like VVIPs invited for some big event. The good vibes got escalated when we reached The Westin at Koregaon Park in Pune. A five-star hotel with lavish facilities and gorgeous ambience augmented by the breath-taking view from our rooms made our day and all the hard work we put to come this far looked justified.
We were invited for dinner with top company executives and managers of Bajaj Finserv. It was an insightful and illuminating night for all of us which we didn’t want to end.
There were 9 teams across different campuses in the national round. We were allowed 15 minutes to present our solution to the esteemed jury of 7 top company executives followed by 5 minutes of Q&A. We presented the same solution in National Finals as our regional finals round with little tweaks in financials and some minor changes in other parts.
Next day top 5 teams presented their detail presentations to the panel in the presence of Mr Sanjiv Bajaj. The team from ISB Hyderabad emerged National Winners whereas IMT Ghaziabad team lifted the Runners up Trophy. Prizes were also given to top 2 investors after the last round of results among the top 10 investors invited to the event.
Though we didn’t win but our team work, experience, learning and Bajaj Finserv’s hospitality will remain with us forever.
Final thoughts and Strategy
I have decomposed our success into several reasons as follows:
A Great Team Combination: The team members exhibited a great combination of skills in domain knowledge, communication, ppt making, idea generation, presentation and Q&A handling, a great sense of teamwork which collectively contributed to our success.
An Extensive Background Study and Research: We put a lot of effort knowing about health insurance sector in our country, its trends and recent developments. We read a lot of articles and case studies to understand the scope and requirements of our problem statement. It helped us to formulate our solution.
Unique Problem Statement Selection: We selected a problem statement which was selected by only a few teams. Most of the teams selected 3 other problem statements available. It reduced the competition a bit and gave us little advantage.
Robustness of the Solution: We studied the problem statement many times and discussed several times in group to brainstorm possible solutions. We ensured our final solution satisfied all the criteria mentioned and it was feasible and easy to implement with the target consumers with the greater business prospect. We also focused on the robustness of the solution and its futuristic nature.
Great Content: Richness of content with detail explanation and value proposition to company was a factor in our success.
To all the case competition aspirants “Dream Big! Work hard! Stay Humble! Success will be yours!”
Thank you!
The author
The author of this piece is Sambit Halder, a recent pass-out of IIM Indore. He’s got some really interesting credentials; Top 5%iler, Rank 6 in his batch| Rank 4 (D2C Top 10 College Champions). Drop a thank you when you can.
We’ve very recently started hosting competition experiences, apart from all the brilliant Brand stories, concepts, we host. If you’ve won a competition and would like to share your “how-to” with the folks here. Write to us.
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