Absa & IMD | Reimagining Banking with Africanacity

The “tragedy of the horizon” captures the gap between long-horizon climate damages and the shorter horizons of corporate decision-making. We provide a contracting account of this idea using a deliberately standard CARA-normal moral-hazard model. U...

The case places participants in the role of Helge Lund, chair of BP, on 4 October 2023. Only weeks earlier, BP's chief executive officer Bernard Looney had resigned over undisclosed relationships with colleagues. Looney had been the principal architect and public face of BP's 2020 strategy to transform BP from an international oil company into an "integrated energy company" aligned with a net-zero ambition by 2050. On the same day, activist investor Bluebell Capital Partners wrote to BP arguing that the strategy was "irrational" and had materially depressed the company's valuation. The challenge came amid conflicting signals: Shareholders had overwhelmingly backed BP's net-zero direction in 2022, but its share price had lagged key peers, raising questions about the economics, timing and execution of the transition. The case presents a board-level dilemma: How should Lund lead the board now, what strategic direction should it support and what CEO mandate should follow? Should BP defend the 2020 strategy, recalibrate it or pursue a more fundamental reset? The case concerns strategic governance and board oversight of transformation under pressure, rather than sustainability alone. It asks how boards should engage in strategy, interpret shifting stakeholder signals, assess investor fit and build support for a strategic pivot, and test organizational readiness for transformation. BP's 2020 strategy was bold and adapted to real external pressures, including climate policy, investor expectations and changing assumptions about the future of oil and gas. It also placed major demands on capital allocation, organizational capability, competitive advantage, stakeholder credibility and investor patience. By autumn 2023, the board had to ask not only whether the strategy remained directionally appropriate, but whether it had been sufficiently owned, explained, sequenced and governed.

The era of unchecked expansion has passed – for Søren Westh Lonning, CFO at FinTech Pleo, the challenge now is to drive balanced, disciplined growth.

The case investigates the supported search fund model pioneered by Novastone Capital Advisors (NCA) through which mid-career executives can achieve their dreams of becoming entrepreneurs though the acquisition of an SME. NCA provides support through the various phases of the program, from talent selection, training, target searches, due diligence, M&A, value creation and exit engineering.

Senior leaders rarely get their most important work done by issuing orders. A CTO cannot compel a partner firm, a dean cannot order a faculty to embrace a curriculum, a ministry cannot be forced to share data. On the questions that matter, outcomes depend on people with agendas and loyalties of their own. This note details a two-part discipline for understanding and influencing stakeholders. The diagnostic section asks who can affect the outcome, where their influence comes from and how things look from their side. It challenges common intuitions: coalitions beat individuals, intensity beats headcount, friendships are not alliances, and the fiercest resistance defends identity and legacy, so no concession will buy it off. Tools include the influence-alignment matrix, network mapping, listening tours, decision archaeology and force-field analysis. The strategic section converts diagnosis into movement, i.e. how to: frame each ask in the currency the audience values, sequence conversations so support accumulates before the decisive meeting, secure small commitments and avoid reactive coalition building, where a leader's own defensiveness unites opponents who agree on nothing else. Written for leaders in business, universities, government and non-profits, the note compares stakeholder management challenges across sectors and closes with a transparency test separating influence from manipulation. A companion exercise (IMD-2789-E) turns the frameworks into a plan for a live challenge.

The Bankamoda case looks at due diligence in the impact investing context. The protagonist, Estefanía Abello, is a Colombia-based senior associate at the Swiss AlphaMundi Group (AMG), an impact first but very commercially minded impact investor that invests in Africa and Latin America. Since 2017, AMG had been integrating gender analysis throughout its investment process. The case opens with Abello having completed the due diligence and considering her recommendation to the AMG Investment Committee on whether to invest in Bankamoda, a women-founded, women-led fintech offering loans to the underbanked micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the apparel and textile industry in Columbia. While this startup fit the profile gender lens investing perspective, the investment also carried significant risks. Students assume the role of Abello and need to balance impact and financial considerations and consider risk mitigation strategies as they make a recommendation. Through this case, students can experience a real impact investing due diligence, understand gender lens investing, explore the layers of considerations needed to build a compelling investment case and simulate how best to present proposals to an investment committee.

Discover how CFOs are evolving beyond traditional roles to become strategic enablers focused on value-driven decisions and intelligent finance strategies.

CFO leadership in volatile times is critical as finance leaders use discipline, risk insight, and strategy to guide companies through disruption

Kevin Warsh focused his first conference as Federal Reserve chair on June 17 on a familiar problem: fast-rising prices fuelled by the Iran war. Yet another challenge facing central banks goes beyond the immediate inflation shock. As investors plac...

Ralph Hamers on leading banking’s biggest digital shift: why banks must be tech-forward and how AI could redefine financial advice.