Brandeis International Business School

Competitiveness Analysis & Creating a Value Proposition: Powerspike is a sponsorship marketplace specifically for live streamers on the Twitch gaming platform. Their goal is to make the process of launching, managing, and tracking influencer marketing campaigns easier for brands. They provide "world-class infrastructure" and boast a streamlined approach to monetizing influencers.

Our marketing students were given the challenge of conducting an in-depth competitive analysis on Powerspike, a firm that operates in a very specific and niche industry. Through this competitive analysis, they were able to pull out what made Powerspike unique and create a detailed, yet succinct value proposition statement. As a smaller company, Powerspike was able to act swiftly on the work our students produced. They using it on their website, and to inform their conversations with future investors and clients, which allowed our students to see the direct impact of their work.  

"Powerspike made changes on their website based on my suggestion, and I am excited my suggestions really helped. The best part is I learned how to use SEMRush to do SEO analysis. I just learned this concept this semester, and I am happy there is a project for me to practice and learn all the functions I can use to do business analysis. This experience will help me a lot in digital marketing analysis in my future career."  

— Kajun Li, MBA '21

Building an Enterprise Data and Reporting: Anthem Sports & Entertainment's mission is to build media brands that can live on multiple platforms reaching a global community. Founded by a Brandeis University alum, Anthem's current portfolio of media companies includes: Fight Network, IMPACT Wrestling, Pursuit Channel, GameTV, Game+, AXS TV, and HDNet Movies. 

This was the final part of a three-stage project with Anthem Sports and Entertainment. Our students worked with Anthem's General Manager of Digital to develop a dashboard that funneled key metrics from across the social media platforms. As the final stage of the project, the students wrote code to enable them to access each social media platform's API to pull the key information and data for Anthem. The students on this project also had the benefit of working with a data science team from India, so it was truly a collaborative opportunity.

Stock Selection Model for Banks: Geode Capital Management is a global systematic investment manager that focuses on the development of advanced quantitative techniques for uncovering market opportunities. With a robust infrastructure and talented investment professionals, Geode offers clients the scale of a large asset management firm, with the benefits of a versatile investment platform. 

Students worked weekly with Quantitivate Analysts from Geode's research team to evaluate banking industry-specific metrics. They used these metrics to help predict future stock returns, and to create models designed to improve bank efficiency and profitability based on different market conditions. The project was supervised by Professor Ying Becker and the students' final presentation was viewed by over 15 members of Geode's team, including senior portfolio managers, analysts and researchers. 

A Social Impact Dashboard for Investors: AgroFides is an AgTech and FinTech firm dedicated to assisting small and medium scale farmers in Ghana by facilitating access to lenders and loans via their platform. In this follow-up field project, AgroFides sought help to create a lender/investor-facing dynamic dashboard that not only would show current statistics related to Ghana and farming, but also get people excited about potentially investing in AgroFides as a result. Students learned about farming in Ghana and gained a new perspective on social impact investing .

"Looking back on the progress I made this semester, I have gained so much deeper understanding of how not only Python works, but also all the different computer languages, files, and finesse that provide the backbone of a website. More broadly speaking, my biggest takeaway is that I have gained the experience necessary to feel confident enough in my coding abilities to tackle almost any project. While I had previous coding experience through my coursework, it is an entirely different beast to code in a client-facing manner, so through this work, I was able to accelerate my learning in a way that is unmatched in a classroom setting." 

— Connor Babcock, MSBA '21

Faster and smarter: A MassChallenge Fintech Inaugural Program participant, Fincura helps businesses grow by enabling banks to make faster and smarter commercial lending decisions. Their machine learning and AI technologies digitize repetitive manual processes behind corporate lending. Through their advanced automation, they are building the world’s most detailed database of anonym private company financial data, giving Fincura the power to optimize the underwriting process for customers with risk analysis, pattern matching and anomaly detection.

The spring 2019 student field project team utilized their expertise in financial data research, competitor research, financial modeling, product pricing analysis and data analysis. Students delivered a final presentation and report outlining their recommendations and opportunities within different lending segments that Fincura could pursue.

"The research and insight provided by the Brandeis field project team was highly valuable in helping us perform market research in different lending segments. We look forward to hosting students for additional field projects in the future."
— Cody Putre, Fincura co-founder and COO

Streamlining catering: Dice is an events logistics and office catering platform that aims to reduce the amount of time people spend planning for a catered event. It curates menus from the local area's top-rated caterers and restaurants populated around the clients' price point, number of attendees and menu preferences. Through the Dice platform, users reduce work time wasted sourcing the right menu, negotiating with vendors and planning logistics.

Students worked with Dice to understand their business goals and marketing efforts to date. They researched and analyzed competitors in their space, target consumers, gained insights to Dice user behavior, developed insights shared in a final presentation, and delivered a suggested strategic marketing plan with a focus on brand visibility and user acquisition growth. 

"The students were well-organized in their execution. They performed research on our competitors to understand how Dice can be further differentiated. They applied what they learn to designing and setting up social media platforms for different sales channels. They were communicative with changes they would want Dice to execute in the future for wider user acquisition." 
— Jeffrey Ho, co-founder and Chief Logistics Officer at Dice

Forward Investing: ForwardLane, a MassChallenge Fintech Inaugural Program participant, is a leading AI FinTech startup that supercharges financial professionals with powerful personalized insights for their clients. Their patent-pending FLAIR platform automatically surfaces actionable insights from structured and unstructured data, enabling users to beat information overload. Data-driven signals provide reasons to engage with clients, along with relevant content to accelerate sales and distribution.

Students gained experience in investment deck research and analysis, developed an understanding of investor expectations related to investment pitch deck, and executed FinTech market analysis, competitor analysis and more to inform their recommendations for successful strategic growth options.

"The conduct of the student team, their depth of research and fast pace was truly exemplary. I was impressed by how much work the student team put into the project and the quality of results achieved. Their ability to learn and adapt to this iterative approach of engagement is a testimony to the student’s commitment, to Professor Abdurezak’s guidance, and to Brandeis International Business School. A very high standard of expertise, studies and concentration, which I think, is very well aligned with the real world."
—Nathan Stevenson, CEO & founder of ForwardLane

Analyzing Crypto: State Street Global Exchange (SSGX) offers proprietary data, investment analytics, data management, portfolio modeling, and electronic trading and clearing, among other services. SSGX introduced the Quantextual Idea Lab as part of the next generation of intelligent client solutions. This solution helps clients synthesize research to fuel effective investment strategies.

Students in 2018 focused on crypto currency, which examines the application of distributed ledger technology (DLT) and the blockchain to finance. Two projects in 2017 focused on fluctuating interest rates and asset returns. One project conducted a quantitative analysis, while the other project entailed a literature review, literature scan and editorial commentary.