Melkani, who worked in banking, brought a knowledge of the industry. Quevedo, a chemical engineer who spent 14 years at Shell Global Solutions in the Netherlands, said he was the motivator and organizer. While all four students contributed to the research, helped to develop the strategy and participated in the presentation, they also brought individual strengths. “We nailed it when it came to the strategy,” Quevedo said. The top four ideas came from the Rutgers team, the judges told the students. The ideas were the ones they thought were most relevant to Truist. Quevedo said the judges – all executives and managers from Truist – told the Rutgers students they had created a list of 10 ideas from the student presentations.
Three schools were represented by two teams. Other participating schools: Bloomsburg, Florida State and University of Southern Florida. Rutgers MBA came out ahead of second-place winner University of Alabama and Florida Southern College, which won the third place prize. The team won first place in a competition with students from 12 other schools, including California State, Indiana State and George Mason University. We wanted to win.”įor Quevedo and his team mates – Alexandra DeMarco, Devasheesh Melkani and Joseph Russomanno – their first case competition demonstrated their knowledge but also their collective resilience and motivation to achieve the goal. “We were a bit exhausted,” Quevedo admitted, “but we kept going.
The four first-year MBA students pivoted to focus on their studies and then immediately returned to preparing for the competition. In the midst of their preparation for the competition, mid-terms arrived.
“We took the four themes and looked for solutions touching on all of them – digital applications, branches, employees and customers,” said Jose Quevedo who helped to keep the team organized and focused. The case competition challenged the students to develop a strategy for how Truist – a bank created from the merger of BB&T and SunTrust banks – would shed redundancies, retain customers, utilize branches and modernize its retail banking services. They had already met and started working within Microsoft Teams, sharing information they were collecting about Truist Bank, the company at the center of the case and trends in retail banking, including potential applications of artificial intelligence.