Lindner Graduate Students Take Top Prizes in Centric Case Competition

Students in graduate programs at the University of Cincinnati’s Carl H. Lindner College of Business participated in three case competitions that allowed them to apply classroom theory to real-world business scenarios.

Centric Case Competition

In the Centric Case Competition, Lindner students took home both first and second place in the February competition that offered recommendations to Vantiv (now Worldpay) regarding the credit card transaction process.

A joint effort between students in the MBA and Master of Science in Information Systems programs, participating teams were given a case that explored solutions to online credit card fraud. Teams made recommendations to combat this trend. Four judges scored the competition based on presentation style, reasonableness of recommendations and support.

MBA students Elisa Garcia and Carl Labanz, and MS-IS students Beth Hilbert, Paddy Mishra, and Andrew Traicoff took first place, while MBA students Blake Linville and Ben Peck, and MS-IS students Suresh Balasundaram, Aakarsh Rajagopalan, and Nitin Rangarajan earned a second-place finish.

ACG Cup

The ACG Cup is a finance case competition of mergers and acquisitions. Participants receive a brief on a potential merger and select the best possible deal for the acquisition. Students earned a score on their presentation skills, sales pitch and strength of their recommendations.

The preliminary presentation, held at UC in January, determined which students would represent Lindner in the larger competition. The final round, held in February in Cincinnati, featured UC’s Carl Labanz, Swetha Moorthy, Ben Peck, and Janean Rundo (all MBA ’18), who placed second, competing against students from Miami University and Xavier University.

Monsanto Olin Case Competition

Lindner students advanced to the final round of the February Monsanto Olin Case Competition at Washington University in St. Louis. The competition is a partnership between the Washington University in St. Louis Olin Business School, Monsanto, and The Boeing Center for Supply Chain Innovation at Washington University.

The competition topic focused on operations and supply chain analytics. Senior members of the Monsanto Supply Chain team attended the event, where students participated in a virtual preliminary round, submitting a one-page memo of recommendations and strategies and a video explaining their thought processes.

Top teams selected from this round traveled to the Olin Business School to give 30-minute presentations further detailing their case recommendations. Lindner’s team consisted of Vidhya Anand, Chitrangada Chouhan, Swetha Moorthy, and Synthia Srinivasan (all MBA ’18), with Chouhan, Moorthy, and Srinivasan traveling to St. Louis for the event. Other top teams this year included those from Johns Hopkins University and MIT. Lindner’s students received positive feedback on their submission and enjoyed valuable networking opportunities.