A group of students from Chinese University beat 475 students from seven other tertiary institutes to take the top prize in this year's SCMP/IFPHK Financial Planner Awards - University Student Category.
The four first- and third-year business students from the university - George Lam Ka-shing, Junes Shek, Wong Siu-hong and Anna Shiu Man-yee - won, among other prizes, an HK$8,000 scholarship, internships at leading financial companies, a trophy and certificates.
Team leader Mr Lam, who just graduated, said the participants found the competition challenging because they had to take their academic knowledge and apply it to real world situations.
He said being quizzed on counselling skills and the ability to convince clients was also challenging as they had never done this before.
As part of their first prize Ms Shek and Ms Shiu won internships at global financial service provider Manulife and platform service provider iFast respectively this summer.
The case in this year's student category involved assuming the identity of a 25-year-old financial planner who was advising a former schoolmate from university. The 'client', Jack, aged 23, had recently begun working after graduating and planned to do an MBA, and to take care of his ageing parents who were to retire soon.
The winning team recommended the purchase of a HK$1million term life insurance policy, with critical illness coverage, to insure Jack against the cost of any expensive medical treatment he might need if he became sick in the future.