ISB Finance Club
Indian School of Business’ Finance Club is a student –driven club that provides students with channels to learn and offer opportunities to develop their management skills. The club from time-to-time organizes events to educate its members about various aspects of the financial world.
Through the events such as Artha, Industry trek and iAlpha it help its members to decide whether a career in financial management or banking is right for them and to provide members with the training, tools and networking necessary to help them secure jobs in financial institutions.
The best part is that the students learn from the leading industry experts and also from each other as part of the club and the events.
Club Activities
The Finance club through its various finance-related initiatives generates awareness throughout the ISB student community. It addresses a wide variety of finance-related concerns, particularly about investment banking, stock market trading, and hedge funding and corporate finance.
Artha
Artha, ISB Capital Markets Conclave, is the annual flagship event of the ISB Finance Club and it brings together leaders of the industry, policy makers and academia for interactive discussions. The idea behind it is to help the students to develop perspectives. This year it was held on 17th Oct at ITC Parel in Mumbai, India’s Financial Capital. The agenda for this year was Emergence of India as a “Break Out Nation.”
The conclave was attended by Mr PJ Nayak, Mr Sanjay Nayar, Harshvardhan (Bain & Co.), Vikram Limaye (MD&CEO, IDFC), Giri Jadeja (Head, IFC), Shankar Narayanan (Carlyle), Vish Narain (TPG Growth), Amay Hattangadi (Morgan Stanlay), Nilesh Shah (Kotak Mahindra) and Prashanth Prakash (Accel Partners) amongst others.
The discussions delved upon digital banking, financial inclusion and the role of microfinance and PMJDY. The panel also discussed innovation in order to attract private and public capital into emerging markets. It touched upon the impact, of Greek crisis, sluggish growth in China and improvement in US markets, can have on trade and investment in India. The third and fourth panels talked about Capital Markets and the Way forward for Sunrise sector in India respectively.
Finance Industry trek
Finance Industry trek, is a student initiative by the Finance Club. This year it commenced on Aug 14. As part of trek – a delegation of ISB comprising 56 students, 5 professors and 4 ISB employees visited 26 major Private Equity, Venture Capital and Investment Banks.
The delegation visited leading industry I-bankers and PE players. Among I-Bankers were Vikram Mago (VP, JM Financials), Mr. Manian (VP, Yes Bank IB), Divyesh Dalal (Indian Head, HSBC IB), Amit Pachisia (APV, ClearWater Capital), Narain Sankaran (CIO, ICICI Pru AMC), Gaurav Gupta (Stan Chart), Kaushal Shah (Senior VP, Kotak IB), Aashish Bhinde (Ex Director, Avendus), Aamit Joshi (MD, Lincoln) and Nikhil Shrivastava (Ambit). Among leading PE players were Rakhi Prasad (Director, Matrix Partners), Sridhar (Principal, Matrix Partners), Jayshree (VP, Khazanah), Amit Jain (Principal, Blackstone), Aditya Arora (GEF), Gladys (Apax), Vikram Gupta (Founder, Ivy Cap), Deepak Mittal (VP, Samara) and Abhinav Jain (Director, Gaja Capital).
The result was that students learnt about the industry and got a better understanding about the deal cycle and how to create value for the end customer (identifying the unicorn). For students who lacked proper finance background, this was an eye-opener of sorts.
iAlpha
iAlpha, is a student-run investment fund/ student-run hedge fund. Co2016 pledged a sum of INR 1.3mm. The team conducted teach-in sessions, where they educated the members about basics of the capital markets and explained how to filter stocks and shared pointers as to how used to analyse the stock market. The team also explained investment rationale behind the stocks.
The highlight of the initiative was the “Value Investing Conference” that was held in Mumbai. It was attended by a very distinguished panel that comprised such as Ramesh Damani, Raamdeo Aggarwal, Chetan Parikh, Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Siddharth Mukherjee and Akash Prakash. The panel debated on how to find the moats of a business and distinguish them from the fake ones. The second panel discussed on the exit time of a stock. During the event, the students interacted with the industry veterans over dinner.
iAlpha team also managed “Real Returns”, a stock simulation event at Advaita, that got an overwhelming international response from the B-schools across the globe. The event comprised of evaluating stocks from both financial and strategic perspective and giving recommendations on how to manage a portfolio.