METRO BANK WINS ARMY INTELLIGENCE CHALLENGE 2021
Metro Bank, the UK’s best community bank, has proved victorious in this year’s battle of the banks aka the 2021 Military Intelligence Challenge.
The annual competition organised by 3 Military Intelligence Battalion for financial services sees ten teams from across financial services including Barclays, HSBC, KPMG, Bank of New York Mellon and UBS compete in a series of challenges and carry out a military style analysis exercise as an opportunity, for those companies who are choosing to support defence, to understand how military is good for business. Due to the pandemic this year the competition was held as a virtual event and it was the first time Metro Bank has entered the challenge.
The winning Metro Bank team comprised Lead Product Managers Rupert Stevens and Ronan O’Dea with Head of SME Credit Risk Ermal Ngjeci, Mortgage Product Manager Joseph Boag, Programme Manager Brij Desai, Lead FP and A Accountant Amreen Bacchus.
“We had to really work as a team – each person volunteered for a role and without prompting or time to practise, stepped up and conducted it” explained Metro Bank team organiser Rupert Stevens. “It was a great demonstration of how to navigate silos and individually conduct the role you are meant to, while uniting behind a common purpose to achieve a good result. As a team we had not worked together before as we represent quite diverse departments across the business – from change, products, risk and finance - but together we proved unstoppable.
Except for Rupert, none of the team had previous military experience. Stevens continues; “There are many transferrable skills between the forces and financial services – this event demonstrated a few of those as analytical methods needed to piece together data into usable information for developing a plan. As well as ensuring ‘so what’ is applied to every line and comment in a document and paper to squeeze the most opportunity out of what is provided and finally clear coordination so everyone is empowered to and takes responsibility for fulfilling their role.”