Finance Challenge is a finance competition, which aims to bring like-minded university students together and put their knowledge up to a test compared to the international standard.

The participants are given different sets of financial problems and an original case study granted by the Financial Modeling World Cup. While students are given the chance to apply their learnings on finance and economics in a practical setting, the teams also compete for a prize pool of 1500 EUR. The competition was sponsored by Capitalia, a major small and medium enterprise financier in the Baltics.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the competition was traditionally held in a hybrid format - preliminary rounds taking place online and the Grand final on the premises of SSE Riga. Given the present circumstances, the Finance Challenge was conducted digitally for the second year in a row, attracting university students from 31 countries.

This year, iFund took measures to make the competition in the digital format as smooth as ever. The cooperation with the Financial Modeling World Cup allowed the participants to receive in-depth feedback for the case study and the return of presentations; and an automatic grading system added a level of transparency and ensured trust in the competition. IFund also implemented targeted marketing for the competition, focusing on attracting bachelor students in the Baltics and around the world. Such a marketing strategy landed the Finance Challenge 348 participants from 31 countries and improved the submissions’ rate.

On June 19, the judging panel – Maksims Sičs, Artjoms Ogorodniks, and Elīza
Oša-Večena – who are finance experts in the Baltics, announced the three winning teams that demonstrated the best results in all rounds.

The first and third places were awarded to teams from Malaysia, and the second place was scored by a team from India- all of which showed excellent knowledge on finance-related topics.

Despite being full of uncertainty, the year 2021 presented opportunities, which allowed iFund to improve the quality of the Finance Challenge competition and work towards the organisation’s collective goal- fostering financial literacy among students.


/ Prepared by the SSE Riga Investment Fund