The five postgraduate students tackled the ethical dilemmas thrown at them at a recent business competition as individual violations and as symptoms of corporate cultural malaise.
Given a month to work through the challenges, the winning team in the CFA Society Toronto competition will have less than a day to turn around a response in the upcoming national stage of the competition.
The students, who are all pursuing master's degrees in finance at York University’s Schulich School of Business, had to respond to a case full of “the dilemmas we would face if we were in the financial world,” said Rishika Bhatia, a member of the Schulich team.
Initially discussing the course of actions and possible violations committed by each character in the case, fellow student Anbochao Wang said that after talking to their faculty adviser Gregory Pau, the team expanded that to “also watch the corporate culture that drives these unethical issues.”
“Thinking in this way really brought our analysis to a whole new level,” Wang said, adding that making their 10-minute presentation more of discussion than a reading likely helped sway the judges.
The team had no way to compare themselves to the competition, which includes teams from the business schools at the Universities of Waterloo and Ottawa as well as Queen's University, since the virtual format left non-presenting teams in a breakout room.
They will now take part in a national competition against regional winners from across Canada.
Their case was presented as a dialogue at a pre-audit staff meeting between a superior and subordinate accountants, the team explained, and considered potential conflict of interest, unfair treatment of customers, and even the challenge of legal restrictions imposed by a country.
The team and their advising professor didn’t speak in detail about the cases, citing copyright issues, and the organizers, the CFA Society, also provided only the broad contours.
"The case presents several situations that can arise in an investment management workplace, particularly surrounding policies and implications of information disclosure and analyst’s independence," a spokesperson said.
But Pau, who moved into teaching at Schulich after a career working at banks and credit rating agencies, said the real-life scenarios presented were very common in his 30-year career.
“Ethics plays a very crucial role (in finance) and through this competition, we were able to understand the real-life case scenarios, how we would tackle them, how we could apply our understanding onto a case,” said Juhi Maru, another of the winning students.
Morgan Sharp / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer
Editor's note: this article was updated at 12:51pm Eastern on Feb. 17 to include CFA Society's response.
Comments
As a leftist, it's sometimes too easy to think that, because an economic structure is fundamentally unjust and designed to create inequality, that's the end of the story. But any system ends up with a lot of friction, not really meeting its full baneful potential, because it's full of people with ethics that are often at odds with the system's demands, making little changes and adjustments as best they can to make their little piece halfway work for people. None of that stuff fixes the system, and people like these lovely young business ethics types are in my opinion fundamentally naive, but still, that human element makes a significant difference to how stuff ends up working.