Noah, Promptus 8 automate JFINEX Inter-Collegiate Finance Competition
Participated in by 23 finalists from various universities and colleges nationwide and across the globe, the 19th Inter-Collegiate Finance Competition (ICFC) held at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas was a resounding success with its first-ever, fully automated system powered by Noah and Promptus 8.
Junior FINEX Philippines through the leadership of chairperson Lofreda Del Carmen, also chief executive officer and president of Forecasting and Planning Technologies Inc. (FPTI), has initiated the automation of ICFC. JFINEX is anchored by the Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines (FINEX), the country’s premier organization of business leaders and finance practitioners.
The organization’s thrust is to foster the future business leaders through various activities and by exposing them to advanced courses of study and world-class finance education standards.
The ICFC is an annual academic competition of JFINEX that aims to gather young and promising students who excel in their business and finance courses from 100 academic institutions in the country.
The questions used in the competition are patterned after the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Level 1 exam. This is a meticulous certification test administered by the CFA Institute, the foremost international organization for investment management practitioners.
“The questions here are not easy, and for you to be part of this, you have to be the cream of the crop,” said Benny Soliven III, liaison director of JFINEX, the committee that oversees all of the association’s youth-centric initiatives.
“The competition is just one day- so are the eliminations- but the students had to prepare way ahead,” Soliven said.
NOAH Business Applications and the Promptus 8 analytics, both of which are products of FPTI, a locally based business solutions provider, have been installed in the laptops used by the participants throughout the competition. Equipped with these remarkable applications, the ICFC has ushered in an innovative approach to staging scholastic matches.
The NOAH gallery of business applications cover a wide range of solutions from finance, accounting, planning, manufacturing, distribution, realty, construction, and procurement that may supplement, complement, integrate and possibly replace an existing enterprise application.
Promptus 8, meanwhile, provide companies with a data management solution and be able to have a comprehensive information that can be used for analysis and decision support.
During the ICFC, the contestants access the questions and enter their answers using the former while the judges compute scores in real time using the latter.
According to Del Carmen, the initiator of these applications, “both of these applications are originally for businesses”; but her team has designed a system dedicated to the ICFC to raise its standards a step higher and hopefully assist all the future undertakings of JFINEX especially in its advocacy on finance education.
“As chair of the committee, there was a clamor for innovations. How else could I do it? I had to bring in our applications development expertise and products,” Del Carmen said, adding “Finally, we have auto- mated the system with robust functionalities without sacrificing the values of discipline and integrity that the competition has become known for.”
Del Carmen’s team at FPTI is currently exploring ways to cascade the mechanism to the ICFC’s elimination rounds, which are done simultaneously across several regions. These technologies would eventually benefit the JFINEX community as it opens more opportunities to learning and advancement beyond the competition.
“We want to be able to create a platform that the members of the JFINEX can use to stay connected with the organization,” she said.