Service Management Field Trip – Thessaloniki

Yesterday marked the last day of in person contact with our project sponsors. They have sent us some preliminary information to analyze and signed off on the project scope and definition. All that remains now is for us to do our analysis and provide our report. That coupled with the completion of our individual assignments will tie up the end of this course.

Shown above: View of Aristotelous Square from the Orizontes rooftop restaurant in Electra Palace Hotel Thessaloniki.

This has been a unique experience, to hear from the mouths of people who live here their opinion on a very timely topic: globalization, competitiveness and the structure of a nation’s (Greece’s) economy. Our professors did a lecture on Monday talking about the characteristics of the Greek economy, breaking down GDP components and telling a story about Greece’s economic focus and structure over the past 5 years as a backdrop for the current conditions the country is facing. They also prescribed a logical recipe for what would be needed to turn the Greek economy around and the challenges involved. These sentiments were echoed by many of the project sponsors who participated as many of them were looking to boost their competitiveness and engage the other economies of the world.

Today, I’ll be spending most of my time wrapping up all remaining loose academic ends in the hope of leaving nothing unfinished for my return to Toronto.

Cheerio!

Later tonight (or, more accurately, early tomorrow morning) I will be flying out of London for Thessaloniki, Greece for my last course: Service Management Field trip, a consulting based project where we work with local companies. While the class doesn’t start until the third week of April, I’ll be in Greece and surrounding countries travelling.

So I apologize in advance if there are few posts between now and then. But who knows? In the country that spawned famous philosophers and mathematicians, maybe there will be some inspiration. Plus, I still have a few small assignments to complete for MCT.

Travelling in Europe

The bizarre truth is that it’s actually cheaper to visit other parts of Europe than it is to stay in London. With the end of the term (and MBA program) upon us, many students (exchange especially) are planning a variety of trips before the academic program is over.

(Shown above: Bull fight, La Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas, Madrid, Spain)

So far this week, I’ve been to Madrid, Spain and Bordeaux, France. I'm travelling with a few students from LBS and we are driving down the coast of the south of France and into northern Spain, visiting coastal towns as we make our way down and are currently San Sebastian, Spain. My French has been a bit rusty, but enough to decipher menus, make orders, ask directions and generally get around. It has been almost 5 years since my CFES days.

(Shown above: Chateau Margaux, Bordeaux, France)

(Shown below: San Sebastian, Spain)

Having visited Lisbon, Portugal and Rome, Italy there is only one other country I need to visit to collect my PIGS set: I plan on visiting Greece in early April for my final block week course: Service Management Field trip, a consulting project based in Thessaloniki, Greece.

I have always enjoyed Greek mythology, especially after reading the Odyssey in high school which was one of my favourite books of all time. I will certainly enjoy spending time in Athens visiting some of the ancient ruins. Greece is also home to many famous mathematicians and philosophers that derived such elegant concepts such as the approximation of pi or the golden ratio. I'm really looking forward to the trip.

MAJUP

The past few weeks have been pretty busy with a variety of events. LBS hosted its first combined TMT conference with the technology and media club on Friday Feb 25th with speakers on topics such as new revenue streams for IPTV and the forecast for cloud computing. There was one particularly interesting speaker who equated using cloud computing to storing informational currency in a bank. While you appear to be giving up control in the form of a physical box hosted on site, the security and convenience of cloud computing is similar to withdrawing money from an ATM.

That weekend I had some friends from Barcelona visiting (they were going to pursue careers in the TMT space) and they also had the fortune to stay for Tattoo, a school wide celebration of cultural diversity with artistic and gastronomic displays. The entire school was set up with tents as students prepared food native to their homelands wearing traditional dress and putting on performances to display their artistic talents.

This past weekend was spent in Lisbon. With exams coming up, it was a good opportunity for the exchange students to have one big go at a trip before many of us run off at the end of the 10 week term period. Time seems to have flown by as we are already in March.

YCIF London – First Conference Call

Today the YCIF in London hosted its first conference call. The speaker was Mr. Carlos Leitao, Chief Economist and Strategist at Laurentian Bank of Canada. He gave some great insight into the outlook of the Canadian economy by providing some colour as to the major macro indicators and the story of what was going on behind the key performance metrics.

I'm looking forward to the next conference call which is slated for Wednesday of next week. The topic will be the European state of the economy for 2011.

YCIF – London Chapter Inaugural Event

Yesterday, the Young Canadians in Finance organized their inaugural event in London at the Royal Automobile Club. The guest speaker was from the Canadian High Commission and spoke on the strong relationship between the UK and Canada and how Canada’s focus on increasing value added exports such as talent in the financial services sector was helping to improve Canada’s name abroad, especially in the light of our strength in the recent financial crisis.

The RAC was a beautiful club and it was nice to meet with fellow Canadians on this side of the pond. It was also surprising what a small world it is, as some of the people I had met had worked with some of my fellow Rotman students back on Bay Street at Canadian banks as recently as this summer.




My friend, Mathieu Bouthillier, has been a driving force for organizing YCIF’s presence in London, the first chapter outside of North America. He’s got a great line up of events including a series of guest speakers and social events which will be happening later this month and in March which I am looking forward to and will certainly attend.

It’s amazing some of the contacts you make and what you can learn just by having conversations with intelligent hardworking people with similar interests and it was a pleasure to be a yesterday’s event.

Chinese New Year in London

xin nian kuai le; gong hai fat choi; selamat tahun cina baru

Earlier this week, a few of the exchange students at LBS went to celebrate Chinese New Year in typical fashion, over a splendid meal, in London’s “alternative” Chinatown near Queensway. While the lineup was fairly long (we ended up waiting for 45 minutes due to exceptionally high traffic volume), the service was otherwise very good and the meal was delicious.

Earlier that week, I was also lucky enough to catch a dragon dance show in London’s official Chinatown near Piccadilly Circus while buying some groceries.

The Globe and Mail featuring Rotman Students

My classmate, Alejandro Macareno, recently spoke with the Globe and Mail on why international students come to Canada and how they add value to the classroom through their unique experience and perspectives.

Being from Venezuela, Alejandro gave helpful comments on a case we had studied in our Managing People in Organization class way back in Q1 of first year when we looked at a Canadian bank acquiring a bank in Latin America and the merger of cultures. He certainly added some meaningful context to our discussion as someone who was born and raised in that part of the world.

You can listen to him speak on the Globe and Mail website on the experience of international students in Canada.

Some of my other classmates from Rotman featured include:
Ajay Jayarajan
Khaled Nounou (The same Khaled who was on the Islamic Finance ICP team)

Recently, I asked my classmates for guest posts about their unique experiences at Rotman and posted the series.

Islamic Finance – Executive 3 Day Program

Today, I presented remotely from London at the Islamic Finance Program, hosted at Rotman for the Executive Program in partnership with Bennett Jones. This was the final component of our Islamic Finance ICP. The team lead by Walid included myself, Arash, Shahzad, Khaled, Kashif and Noureen and we presented our materials to the executive program participants.

With the rise of Islamic finance, I’ve had some interesting conversations with people I’ve met while on exchange at LBS regarding Sharia compliant financial structures such as the various types of sukuks we’ve been analyzing.

Our spread analysis drove quite a bit of interest for people who were interested in what a Sharia compliant structure would yield and the market conditions for doing such an issuance. Even before our presentation, I had the opportunity to answer some basic questions regarding the pricing spread between Islamic instruments versus conventional.

Senatus Populus Que Romanus

Quando sei a Roma vai dove vanno i romani
"When in Rome do as the Romans do"

One of the benefits of doing exchange, particularly in Europe, is the ability to travel to new places, see new things and meet new people. This weekend I visited Rome flying on EasyJet from Gatwick. Thankfully, my teammate for Private Equity / Venture Capital was a good sport, agreeing to meet well in advance of an assignment due for next week to finish it as I would be incommunicado for the weekend.

I visited the Colosseum and the Roman forums where ancient ruins stretched across parks. Even the city itself was sprinkled with fountains, statues and monuments. It was impossible to travel for even a few meters without encountering a plethora of fountains, making it surprisingly difficult to navigate the entangled narrow streets using landmarks.

Like many travellers collecting stamps on our passports, I was hoping to get a stamp from the Vatican (afterall it is technically its own country, the smallest country in the world). However, despite the tall walls surrounding the city, there was no security or passport control. The Sistine chapel and St. Peter's Basillica were very serine and it was nice to just enjoy the solemnity and gravity of the place.

The trip itself was actually punctuated more with food and wine then tourism to be honest. It was nice to just relax somewhere enjoy copious amounts of "vino della casa", putting down several "brave soldiers", and generous portions of fresh pasta and risotto.

My only regret is pushing my return so late, arriving "home" to London on Tuesday afternoon with just enough time to shower and rush to class, a mistake I will not repeat on my next excursion.

Veni, vidi, vici

Arrived in Britannia!

I've arrived and moved in to my flat which is right across the street from London Business School which is convenient. Apparently, we happen to be very close to some famous addresses on "Baker street":

We've met our exchange classmates from around the world and are slowly going around meeting the 400 students in each of the 2011 and 2012 classes. There are some impressive resumes and experiences of the small sample of people we've met so far.

[Rotman] Ghana, another perspective

[Rotman Series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Darshan is an another good friend of mine from Rotman. He holds Bachelor of Technology, Applied Electronics and Instru, University of Kerala and also spent this last summer in Ghana.

Darshan has graciously written me a summary of his experiences which were from a different perspective than Harman’s (Darshan's had a bit more of a engineering / technology flavour). It follows:

Snapshots from Ghana – An Emerging Nation in West-Africa
Looking back, my 3-month Ghanaian summer experience provided a fairly deep understanding of the opportunities and challenges present in this sub-Saharan African country – one that is at the cusp of a developmental inflection point. Along with a fellow Rotman MBA student and four other Canadians, I was working for a non-profit organization located in Kumasi. The organization (SMIDO) dealt with supporting close to 80,000 people - a community of artisans, auto mechanics and metal workers in Suame Magazine (sector of densely populated metal workshops) – to gain market access and facilitate an ecosystem required for businesses to compete with the formal sector.

I arrived in Kumasi with a hazy idea in my mind about the place – drawing pictures and parallels with my home state Kerala, located in southern India. Those ideas were redrawn in the first few hours after I reached there. More than anything else, my first impression of Kumasi was that of a highly dense, busy, loud urban community trying to make ends meet. Beyond that first impression, however, the environment has a noisy vibrancy colored with great optimism about a better future.

Here are a few highlights from my visit there:

Industry and Client Site Visits: My tryst with Ghanaian business began with an introduction to Ghana's gold mining sector. After meetings with gold miner Central African Gold, who was once our client, I got a chance to tour their gold mine pits and extraction plants to see their operations first hand – this was quite an interesting piece of the visit. In another meeting with Red Back Mining, a Canadian gold miner, what was memorable was hearing the head of the firm’s social responsibility group talk at length about Red Back Mining's efforts to establish lasting relationships with the mine’s displaced community. Red Back has invested considerable resources in helping the local community in which it operates and asked our expertise in partnering with them to design skill development and training programs for apprentices from those displaced communities.

Economic Growth Prospects: Apart from mining, another key growth prospect in Ghana is information communication technology (ICT). Most high school children in urban centers have a Facebook account and there is an increasing trend toward being connected to the world - through mobile phones or the internet. Along with the addition of the focus on energy resulting from the recent discovery of sizeable oil reserves off the coast of Ghana, the country also has a Green Revolution going on where local farmers are getting more yields and income from their crops.

Talks with Ministers and Entrepreneurs: Some of the chats with Ghana’s politicians such as the Minister of State for Environment revealed a message of prudence concerning the potential perils of newfound natural resources and a desire to expand unions with other West African countries. A chance conversation with social entrepreneurs like Ashley Murray (Waste Enterprises) gave me a sense of profound optimism of the future of the private sector. The fact that Ghana enjoys a reverse brain-drain, wherein internationally educated Ghanaians and foreign nationals are increasingly returning home from North America and Europe to begin careers that will design enterprise development seems to support this growing optimism.

Despite the different rendezvous with entrepreneurs, business people and ministers, the time spent with the people within the non-profit was perhaps the best part of my summer. The long bus rides and trips were memorable as they included time to talk about our cultural experiences. Created by the common bond of intense cultural experiences – with visits to the beaches of Cape Coast, Elmina Castle slave trading post, Kakum and Mole National Parks and the countless soccer games we watched together - the personal connections forged during the trip will no doubt be more valuable to me and a true measure of my impact.

I departed Ghana very impressed by the hospitality of the Ghanaian people, the immense potential of the country and the depth of the challenges that will present themselves along this nation's path to growth.

[Rotman Series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Flying out for Exchange, London Business School

I think it's finally hit me. I'm flying to London. I'm sitting in Pearson airport taking advantage of the free wifi, wrapping up a few things and my excitement level is steadily increasing. Geoff Wylde, the other Rotman student going on exchange to LBS has been busy, having left last week. I've been getting emails from the international exchange students who are already there and their social plans for their time in the UK.

I'm really looking forward to being at a new school and meeting new people. As with Rotman, it will be another opportunity to meet likeminded individuals and participate in various events (I would be severely disappointed if my participation in events like case competitions dips even a little bit).

MBA Games was fun, with Rotman winning the Spirit Q&A awards. The Rotman organizing team did a phenomenal job planning our participation this year, only our second year participating. It occurs to me that this is the largest student event I’ve ever been to; even CFES Congress and CEC were only about 220 students, whereas the MBA games were 662 from 20 MBA schools across Canada. I also met some old friends from the FEI case comp, RIM and even junior high! Small world.

The winning team was University of Alberta, so it seems that next year’s team will have an interesting trek to the next games assuming they can get funding support. The host of the games is the previous year’s winner, unlike the CEC which uses a bidding system.

[Rotman] India, US, Canada, and Africa

[Rotman Series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Harmanpreet is an international student from India and holds a Bachelor of Computer Science and Engineering degree from the National Institute of Technology in Jalandhar, India and will be joining Deloitte’s technology consulting practice once he is finished his MBA at Rotman.

Harman had the interesting experience this past summer of working in Ghana, Africa and I’ve asked him to provide a short reflection of the experience which follows:

Before joining Rotman School of Management I was working as a technology consultant in one of the leading investment banks in New York.

To fast pace my career I decided to pursue MBA and because of some personal reasons chose Canada as place for that. I chose Rotman because of its excellent faculty and its location proximity to finance and consulting industry. I must say it has been an eye opening experience. The people I met, their vast experience, the work they have been doing in past amazes me.

I decided to take a bit different route to enrich my MBA experience. While working full-time in professional world it is very difficult to get an option of doing something completely different.

During summer break, I went to Ghana to work for Suame Magazine Industrial Development Organization (SMIDO). It is an industrial development organization of the biggest industrial cluster in sub Saharan Africa. SMIDO is an umbrella organization of various businesses in Suame Magazine area and is committed to ensuring the development of Suame Magazine into a technologically advanced industrial estate and representing the various economic groups that operate within the area.

Working in a under developed economy is a real challenge. But the satisfaction that I got from work that changes someone’s life is incomparable and this feeling kept pushing me to put more and more efforts into whatever I was trying to achieve.

My most important contribution while there was to approach a gold mining company with a proposal to sponsor apprenticeships for people displaced by their mining operations. It was ecstatic when the mining company accepted the proposal.

After summer experience my whole approach to business has changed. I used to think that business means making more money for you and for your shareholders. Now I believe that purpose of business should be to benefit human society rather than to accumulate wealth to satisfy egos.

It was an experience that I will cherish for rest of my life.
-Harman Singh

[Rotman Series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

[Rotman] What country starts with "A", but doesn't end with "A"?

[Rotman Series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Arash is a old friend of mine back from my McMaster Engineering days. After pursuing his Masters of Engineering, he decided to come to Rotman to do his MBA and will be joining Booz & Co in the Middle East when he is finished here. We also went on the Latin America Study tour together in May of last year.

During my visit on the Middle East study tour, we visited the Aga Khan foundation. The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) is a group of development agencies with mandates that include the environment, health, education, architecture, culture, microfinance, rural development, disaster reduction, the promotion of private-sector enterprise and the revitalisation of historic cities. AKDN agencies conduct their programmes without regard to faith, origin or gender.

One of their impressive projects was their work with Roshan, a unique telephone company that performed to the same standards of private enterprise with regards to profit generation, but also imposed high standards to their relationships with governments regarding transparancy. Arash had the opportunity to work with Roshan this recent summer and he's written a post about the experience which follows:

Little did I know what adventures awaited me upon starting my MBA at Rotman. Of course it would open new doors and new opportunities, but where exactly was still to be determined. However, I knew that I would have preferred an international experience, as a result of which I also signed up for the Latin America study tour for which we visited Brazil and Argentina. When summer recruiting came around, I applied to both domestic and international opportunities. Of the postings that came up, the one that stood out the most was the one by Roshan Telecom in Afghanistan. Having been born in Afghanistan, I jumped at this opportunity to go to back and work there. I was very young when I left Afghanistan so I never actually got to see the country, so this opportunity was ideal – international work experience in an extremely challenging work environment and the ability to see the country and my extended family.

Naturally, working there was not easy, and definitely not for the faint-hearted. The challenges were numerous – adapting to the local work culture, working with expats colleagues from 20+ countries, and learning about the telecom sector as well as the market in Afghanistan. Imagine doing business in a country where there is little to no rule of law, very little regulations and a largely illiterate population. In addition to this, security restrictions were extremely tight and violations were swiftly dealt with (one intern was sent home for breaking curfew rules). However, these restrictions were definitely necessary – while I was working there, there were numerous incidents in Kabul, including a suicide bombing, roadside bombing, rocket attack on the airport, riots and street fighting. The challenge was to try to reduce the possibility of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, and really, the wrong place could be anywhere, and the wrong time could be any time. Despite this, I did managed to connect with relatives there (they had seen me when I was born but I never met them), and made visits to a couple historic sites in Kabul as well as Herat. It was definitely interesting to see some of the places that my parents saw when they grew up, although things now were radically different. Over the last 30 years of war, the population of Kabul swelled from 400,000 to over 4 million and you could definitely feel it.

My project at the company was as interesting as it was challenging. I had no background in the telecom sector. More specifically, I was looking into a type of fraud that occurs in the sector, which made matters even more complex. My project was to analyze internal detection and treatment mechanisms as well as to come up with potential strategies for preventing this fraud from taking place. After spending days learning about this problem and gathering data, I spent the following weeks working on analyzing the information to develop actionable strategies that could be used to reduce the impact this fraud had on the company. I found it extremely interesting, and I found several areas of improvement that could positively impact the company by improving their fraud strategy.

After work we were shuttled back from the office in downtown Kabul to our guesthouse just on the outskirts of the city. Life was actually less complicated there than it is here – we had room service that cleaned our room every day, we had laundry service and buffet style breakfast, lunch and dinner. I absolutely loved the fruits there – the best grapes and cantaloupes I have ever had in my entire life. After dinner people hung out in their rooms or relaxed out in the courtyard, watched the Indians/Pakistanis play cricket, worked out, played basketball or played pool. All in all, not a bad life, if it weren’t for the volatility of the country.

Overall, it was a fantastic opportunity to work in a challenging environment and with an interesting company. I never thought that coming to Rotman would have enabled me to work in Afghanistan, but it did, and I am definitely grateful for that. In addition to this, the study tour was definitely very interesting and also helped solidify my interest in working abroad. Moving forward, I will be working full-time for a top tier management consulting firm in the middle-east, an opportunity which also came about through Rotman. Not only did my MBA at Rotman open new doors for me, but it opened up the entire world to me – the world truly is my oyster.

[Rotman Series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

[Rotman] Why is an MBA taking a Geology class?

[Rotman Series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

As I’m preparing to go to go to LBS, I’m dedicating this week to Rotman: What makes us different? Over the next 5 days, I’ll be putting up posts about what differentiates Rotman the school and the students, not just locally, but also within a global context.

The first post is about Shree, a brilliant friend and colleague at Rotman who I respect very much. He also had a very unique experience; an opportunity which I think is often over looked and should be highlighted. Specifically, that Rotman is part of the University of Toronto, but more than just having access to U of T’s libraries, sports facilities and resources, as U of T students, we also have access to elective courses outside the business faculty.

Shree had the idea of taking an engineering geology course because he has a natural interest in commodities and wanted to have the insight and gain a higher level of understanding of mining.

I’ve asked Shree to write a honest review of the course (GLG 1442) and I’ve included it below:

Do you have a specific career in mind that demands you know things other than the 4Ps of marketing or the time value of money? If so, you might want to look into picking up a course outside of Rotman in that area.

My job involves looking at investments, and since Canada is often referred to as the “mining capital of the world”, I felt that a geology course would add value to my education. With this in mind, I took the GLG 1442 course, which is offered through the Earth Sciences department at UofT. My review in a nutshell:

Learning accomplished: 9/10
Relevance of the course to everyday business: 6/10
Organization of the course: 3/10
Degree of difficulty: 8.5/10

Lets break down the components above into more detail –

Learning accomplished: If there was one objective in my mind for taking this course, it was to learn more about geology. The course was highly education towards this objective. I was able to learn about different types of deposits, how they are formed, what the typical characteristics of such deposits are and where a certain type of deposit can be found. I doubt I would have been able to achieve all this learning outside of the classroom within a four month time frame. As a result, I give a very high grade for the learning accomplished.

Relevance of the course to everyday business: Let’s face it. Many of you will never have to deal with a mining company in your career. This reduces the relevance of the course right away. However, for those who want to become involved in equity research or investment banking that could benefit from having some knowledge of geology, this course should provide a decent level of groundwork. Relevant topics include different types of deposits for specific metals as well as the grade, tonnage characteristics of these deposits. There is very little coverage regarding the costs related to mining these types of deposits, which makes this course somewhat less relevant than it could be. Secondly, there isn’t much coverage regarding the economics of mining either, which further erodes the relevance.

Organization of the course: If you are expecting a course which is organized in a manner similar to Rotman, you are in for a huge shock. A combination of handwritten overheads, no powerpoints and old school slide projectors makes the organization of this course difficult to follow. Additionally, there are in class handouts which are meant to supplement the handwritten notes, which further make it difficult to keep track of what might be going on in the course. The structure of the course is fairly loose since materials covered tend to skip many parts of the notes and does not strongly tie into the textbook. In fact, I never had to even use the textbook.

Degree of difficulty: The major fact of this course is that this is a graduate level geology course. The majority of the students taking this course are mining engineers or geologists. You will be expected to be on the same level as these guys pretty much from day one. Given the lack of a foundations course, this puts a student at a huge disadvantage. Therefore, if you are taking this course with the expectation of getting a good mark, you may be better off sticking with a Rotman course. If you are expecting to take this course as an elective, you are definitely better off taking a Rotman course. Compared to a typical Rotman course which is 2 hours of lectures per week, you will find that this course demands 5 hours of class time (2 hours of lectures + 3 hours of lab time). There is also a lab exam in this course which is unrelated to the materials covered in the exam, which means you are really taking an equivalent of two courses. The takeaway here is, be prepared for a difficult course and have some prior knowledge of the materials before hand. This will be the difference between struggling through this course and potentially failing this course.

Conclusion: For the people who have a genuine interest in mining, this course is highly useful. This course would be much more useful if it were better organized and had a better tie-in with business concepts such as IRR, project financing etc.

[Rotman Series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

ICP Islamic Finance - "Conventional" Analysis

This morning we had a working session for our ICP - Islamic Finance with some lawyers, a corporate banker and professors. The two teams presented their analysis of the conventional financing structure of the primary security instruments used to finnace our projects. Under this conventional analysis, we looked at the costs of capital and the associated terms related to these types of paper with the intent of understanding the requirements need to make them Sharia compliant.

We also had great explanation from a senior lawyer regarding the structuring and "asset-based" (versus "asset-backed") nature of nominating (rather than selling) assets under a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) in order to comply with the necessary requirements of Islamic finance. We had considered the capital gains implications of a sale leaseback transaction, as well as understood how an asset and capital intense infrastucture project would look similar under an adjusted EV to EBITDAR metric regardless of the off-balance sheet financing that may potentially be required.

We have a solid understanding of the work requirements due before our next meeting in early January (before I fly off for London). We also had an opportunity to fire questions back at the professionals in the room in terms to learn what were the appropriate resources for generating comparables for analysis and benchmarking of our theoretical capital structures based on similar Sharia compliant instruments and current market conditions.

Some of the best advice we got:

• Understand the difference between "asset backed" versus "asset based" and how that affects your ability to issue Sharia compliant instruments
• Be aware of tax implications of capital gains/losses in a sale leaseback transaction
• Like any financial security, understand the key characteristics of seniority and expected return for a sukuk issuance and understand market appetite for these structured products

Islamic Finance - International Consulting Project

A new initative at Rotman (although you wouldn't know it as it has simply exploded this year) is the International Consulting Project. Laura Wood, Director of International Programs, has started a new research type project that engages students to work with professors on international topics. Some countries involved are the G20, Middle East, Israel, Africa and potentially others.

I myself am participating in the Islamic Finance ICP with Walid Hejazi, the professor who leads the Middle East study tour.

Yesterday, we were invited to attend the kick off event for the Islamic Finance EMBA course which will be offered in Jan 2011. The keynote speaker was David Dodge, Senior Advisor, Bennett Jones and former Governor of the Bank of Canada. He spoke about the growing interest in Islamic finance and how there it is common for people to see Shariah compliant instruments as simply "no interest" and how this superficial understanding does not encompass the fundamental rational for the structure of these products.

I am looking forward to working with my four other colleagues on this research project to look at Islamic financial instruments.

Financial Executives International Competition

On Wednesday we had Rotman’s internal competition for the Financial Executives International competition. I was part of a team of four, including Irina, Shree and Matt Literovich. The case was on Tiffany’s expansion into Japan and how they wanted to protect themselves from exchange risk. All the teams did a comprehensive analysis on the potential hedging options and the exposure. It was very humbling to see the caliber of work produced by our classmates in such a short period of time.

It was great to work with my team mates and our discussion on the financial strategy was highly enlightening. In the end, we looked at a variety of strategies including forward contracts, put options and collars.

Yesterday, we found out that we were selected to represent Rotman at the national competition which will be hosted by Ryerson on November 12th. Unfortunately, Irina will be unable to attend, but Fei has gratiously joined our team.

We are all excited at the opportunity to represent our classmates and showcase Rotman talent as well as meet MBAs from all across Canada at the "Best-in-class" competition.

Study Tour Applications - Latin America Study Tour Series

Applications for study tour have been submitted for January tours and students are getting emails for interviews over the next period. It seems like there are a lot of keen students who are interested in participating and it looks like there will be some strong candidates representing Rotman in the Middle East and China study tours.

Anticipating the release of applications for the May international study tours for Latin America, I've cleaned up my Latin America Study Tour Series and posted a link in the navigation bar for your reading pleasure.