Corporate Partner for 2020: zeb

The International Business Projects reinforce the CEMS partnership between universities and companies in jointly shaping international Management education. The course is designed as a real life learning experience for students. It provides students with a unique opportunity to gain insights into corporate practice. International student teams solve a real business, strategy and/or management problem as a one-termactivity tutored by university faculty and the company.

1) Digital Lending

Mortgage loans are currently considered as “last stronghold” of the offline banking channel. However, with evolving customer expectations concerning transparency and comparability of lending offers, price pressure has been increasing over the last years. zeb expects that more than two thirds of Austrian bank earnings for mortgage loans in 2023 will be generated involving digital channels and thus we observe a strong need for the development of online/ offline hybrid solutions in Austria.
Your task is to analyze current competitive offers and a detailed review of customer expectations. How digital does a mortgage process have to be? How can a digital mortgage process be integrated into a digital ecosystem and what other services would appeal to customers in this context? Based on your research you will develop recommendations for the future strategic positioning of banks’ mortgage products in the Austrian market.

2) Mobile Payments

More and more banking activities are migrating from online banking to mobile banking. The same applies to payments, were we have seen an steady increase of payments being initiated through smart phones and tablets. While mobile payments has already strongly established itself in North America and Asia , especially in China with Alipay and WeChat, it is still slowly picking up in Europe. Your task is to analyse the current competitive landscape and market conditions, as well as the current solutions being developed and deployed. Based on your research you will develop a conceptual mobile payment solution and the respective business and operating model.

After completing this course, students will have

*gained insights into the challenges the two companies are facing in an international market enviroment and how they deal with such issues,

* got a hands-on business development experience,

*learned how to analyze and structure real-life strategy and/or Management situations in a global context,

*combined and applied several theoretical concepts tothe international strategy and/or management challenge,

*received feedback from practitioners on the outcome of their analysis and the viability of their recommendations.

It is the express policy of the class that no late assignments will be accepted under any circumstances. As this course format heavily relies on personal interaction between students, corporate partner, and faculty, presence in sessions is mandatory. More than two times absence will lead to exclusion from the seminar.

This business Project uses a combination of discussions with company representatives, feedback sessions, presentations, group coaching and feedback, as well as individual/group work outside the classroom. Groups of students will be formed in the kick-off session.

In a first kick-off session with supervising faculty, the challenges and milestones of the real-life international strategy (management) case are outlined. At the same time, students are familiarized with the guiding principles of project work, with the project plan and rules in handling supervising faculty/corporate partner interaction.

After familiarizing the students with the international strategy (management) challenge, contact with the respective corporate partner is established. In a plenary session, the corporate partner outlines the business challenge from their perspective and provides useful input into the business, the market situation, and the specific challenge to bedealt with.

Subsequently, groups of students work on their assigned real-life international strategy and/or management case. Groups collect relevant data through secondary and primary (qualitative and/or quantitative) market research. Based on these analyses, recommendations for the specific challenges are prepared and substantiated through theory and market research results.

Throughout the process,various feedback loops (in coaching sessions with the individual faculty supervising group work, in plenary sessions with all groups/academic supervisors (mid-term presentation), or in coaching and feedback sessions with the corporate partner) are installed to make sure that students are on the right track and get the input needed in each project phase.

Results are presented to the corporate partner at the end of this process. The verbal and printed presentations will be assessed. Students will have to actively participate in class, hold group presentations and summarize their findings in a final report.

Assessment is based on the quality of the mid-term presentation and end-term presentation, the participation during the classes, group members’ peer rating, and the final report. This implies anability to work in teams. Students failing to participate in their teams will lose the marks for that piece of work and thereby fail the entire course.