Absa & IMD | Reimagining Banking with Africanacity

In August 2023, Alpian's founding CEO Schuyler Weiss announced his departure, promoting Gianmarco Bonaita to the role. Alpian had pioneered digital Swiss private banking. With three rounds of financing, a full-fledged Swiss banking license from FINMA and a strategic partnership with Fideuram–Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking, it also demonstrated a solid B2B potential selling its digital technology. Reinventing the private banking industry for digital natives was no simple feat. Among the most pressing concerns were how to reduce the client acquisition costs, how to diversify private banking services, how broadly to expand Alpian retail services while keeping the costs down and how to develop the fledgling B2B market. Scale was clearly of the essence, and so far it had come at a very high cost. What else could they do to increase brand awareness and client acquisition to accelerate scale up without proportional cost increases? And as if that was not enough, Alpian also had to deal with the agenda of a new majority owner.

Could government borrowing, AI investment and falling corporate profits trigger a global financial crisis? Explore the pressures and risks for business.

Pirelli CFO Fabio Bocchio explains how disciplined capital allocation, sustainability investment, and balance-sheet strength build resilience.

Europe's AI teardown reveals strengths, gaps, and a path to strategic autonomy for European firms and policymakers.

CFOs in the AI era: design data-models and workflows that maximize value, redefine productivity, and establish transparent AI governance.

Caroline Schmidt, 55, chief strategy officer of Edelweiss Corporation, has just led her company through a remarkable turnaround. When Henri Vonlanthen, CEO of Léman Corporation – a company twice Edelweiss's size – invites her to join Léman's board, Caroline sees a genuine opportunity: a bigger stage on which to apply the strategic and financial expertise that turned Edelweiss around, and a chance to help a storied family enterprise chart its next chapter. Léman, built over three generations by the Keller family and taken public in 2010, is a company with real assets and real needs: a strong balance sheet but a flat top line, two fast-growing subsidiaries alongside stagnant ones, and no clear long-term strategy. Its aging patriarch, Samuel Keller, remains chairman, and the board might need refreshment. Could Caroline, working alongside her ally Henri and maybe other board members, build the coalition needed to drive the strategic change Léman requires? Or would she find herself without the influence to move a set board, exposed instead to legacy issues and a possible conflict of interest with her own company? As Caroline's first appointment to a major board, her decision also carries a signaling dimension; the boards that a rising executive chooses to join, and how visibly she vets them, shape how the market will read her judgment for years to come. The case gives students a realistic, decision-forcing vehicle for weighing a directorship's opportunities against its risks: What due diligence a prospective director should conduct, how to assess whether one can genuinely influence and ally with fellow directors, and how a first major board appointment signals character and judgment to the market.

Jerry Davis examines prediction market risks and explains why these politically backed platforms may resemble high-stakes casinos more than stock markets.

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 arch...

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