Simulations that recreate the real work
Finsimco builds finance simulations and business simulations that recreate the actual work of finance and professional services roles - the tasks, the challenges, the decisions, the trade-offs, and the pressure. Each one is a live, role-based job simulation where participants do the work rather than read about it.
This page is an overview of the simulation library by topic.
Why our simulations are different
Our job simulations are built and maintained by a network of practitioners who have actually done the work - people from investment banking, private equity, venture capital, and senior management roles across financial and professional services. They design the scenarios, test them with participants, and keep the content current.
2 principles are in every simulation in the library.
Realism. The value of a job simulation is in how closely it mirrors the real job. Our simulations use realistic case studies, authentic data, and the sequence of decisions a role actually involves.
Built-in competition. Wherever it fits, participants compete - against other individuals or other teams in the same cohort, under a clock, with consequences that unfold based on what they decide. We apply the mechanics of games - goals, stakes, progression - to real work.
A well-designed simulation does two things at once that few other formats manage: it is intuitive enough that participants quickly grasp what the work is about, and revealing enough that it shows how each person performs in that environment. That combination is what makes our simulations effective for learning and assessment alike.
Explore simulations by topic
The library spans the full range of finance and professional services.
Corporate Finance
Valuation, capital structure, and the financial decisions every company faces.
Capital Budgeting · Time Value of Money · Working Capital Management · Valuation · Financial Modeling and Valuation · Cost of Capital
Investment Banking
Transaction-focused simulations covering the deal work at the heart of investment banking - structuring, negotiating, and executing under real conditions.
Mergers & Acquisitions · Leveraged Buyout (LBO) · Initial Public Offering (IPO) · Debt Financing · Debt Restructuring · Investment Banking · Private Equity
Markets & Investments
How capital is allocated and managed across debt and equity markets - from portfolio construction to derivatives and alternative strategies.
Portfolio Management · Derivatives · Hedge Funds · Wealth Management · Equity Research
Accounting
Reading, interpreting, and acting on the numbers. These range from foundational, learning-by-doing exercises to advanced analytical work.
Financial Statement Analysis · Managerial Accounting · Forensic Accounting
Risk & Compliance
Identifying, pricing, and managing risk - and operating within the regulatory frameworks.
Credit Analysis · Financial Risk Management · Regulatory Compliance in Finance · Crisis Management
Entrepreneurship
Building and funding new ventures - from first idea to investor negotiation.
Startup Creation · Startup Funding · Venture Capital · Lean Startup · Product-Market Fit
Strategy & Management
The frameworks and judgment behind business decisions.
SWOT Analysis · Porter's Five Forces · Go-to-Market Strategy · Management Consulting · Strategic Business Planning · Business Turnaround Strategy
Governance
Board-level decisions, ethics and sustainability.
Corporate Governance · ESG · PESTLE Analysis · Boardroom Negotiation · Ethical Leadership
Economics & Data
The wider economic context and data and technology reshaping finance.
Microeconomics · Macroeconomics · Data Analysis · Fintech
The simulations are for
University teaching for lecturers: bring practical finance simulations and business simulations into the classroom with grading data, simple setup and teaching support.
New hire onboarding for graduate program managers: help interns, new analysts, and graduates practise realistic tasks and challenges before they join the desk.
Talent development for HR and L&D teams: develop judgment, commercial thinking, communication, and collaboration through realistic simulation-based learning rather than passive e-learning.
Campus recruitment for early-careers teams: run simulation events on target campuses to strengthen employer branding, attract large numbers of students, and identify top performers through live candidate assessment.
Where simulations work best and where they don't
Simulations are not the right tool for everything. The clearest test is whether success depends mainly on knowing the answer or deciding what to do. If someone only needs to remember a definition, reproduce a formula, or follow a stable procedure, direct instruction or a conventional test may be faster and clearer. If performance depends on interpreting incomplete information, balancing competing objectives, working through other people, and adapting as consequences unfold, a simulation can reveal and develop capabilities that conventional formats struggle to reach.
Simulations are at their strongest where the challenge is not memorising facts but applying judgment. They work best for:
- Processes and sequences - work that unfolds in stages, where each decision affects what happens next.
- Interactions and stakeholders - negotiating, managing client expectations, persuading, collaborating, and handling disagreement.
- Complex, changing situations - ambiguity, incomplete information, competing interpretations, and conditions that shift while you work.
- Pressure and the unfamiliar - new, uncomfortable, or high-stakes situations where composure, prioritisation, and communication matter.
- Trade-offs and second-order effects - decisions where improving one outcome may weaken another, and the full consequences only become visible later.
- Integrated performance - work that requires several capabilities at once, such as analysing information, making a commercial decision, communicating it clearly, and responding when challenged.
These are exactly the things that traditional formats - lectures, reading, video, questionnaires, and many conventional tests - struggle to teach or observe in context. You cannot learn them fully by being told about them, and it is difficult to assess them by asking someone how they believe they would respond. You understand them more clearly when people have to act.
A well-designed job simulation allows a participant to demonstrate how they interpret information, what they prioritise, which trade-offs they make, how they communicate, and whether they adapt when the situation changes. This can make the same underlying experience useful for teaching, training, development, and candidate assessment, although the way it is configured and scored should reflect the purpose.
The right kind of realism
A simulation does not become effective simply by containing more detail or looking more like a video game. The important form of realism is decision realism which we try to integrate as much as possible. A job simulation or business simulation should preserve the structure of the real work:
- What information is available at each point?
- What information is missing or uncertain?
- Which objectives are in tension?
- Who else influences the outcome?
- What constraints limit the available choices?
- How does one decision change the next?
- What consequences follow from different actions?
A visually impressive simulation can still be weak if the decisions are artificial or the consequences are arbitrary. We have experienced that simpler interfaces produce deeper learning. Recreating real relationships between information, choices, stakeholders, and outcomes has to be incremental and controlled. Complexity can overload beginners and distract them from the capability being developed. But simplifying a scenario too far removes the ambiguity and tension that make the real work difficult. Good simulation design therefore includes enough realism to preserve the challenge while removing detail that does not contribute to the learning or assessment objective.
Simulations compress experience
One of the most valuable things a simulation can do is compress experience. In the workplace, it may take months before a new analyst sees the consequences of a recommendation, encounters a difficult stakeholder, or experiences a transaction changing direction. A simulation brings those connected moments into a single experience. Participants make a decision, see the consequences, reconsider their assumptions, and try a different approach. This does not replace workplace experience, but it helps people arrive at the workplace with a mental model that would otherwise take much longer to build. Simulations are especially useful for situations that are important but difficult to practise deliberately on the job. For assessment, this compression has the advantage that every candidate is given a meaningful opportunity to demonstrate capability without an employer waiting for the right situation to arise naturally. The simulation creates a controlled version of the challenge so that performance can be observed within a practical period of time.
Competition to create pressure
Competition makes a business simulation more engaging and more realistic. It introduces urgency, uncertainty, comparison, and the need to respond to other participants rather than solve a static problem alone. But competition only adds value when it supports the underlying objective. A poorly designed simulation allows participants to master the mechanics of the game without understanding the business principle behind it. They may learn how to maximise the score rather than how to make a defensible decision.
The strongest simulations make the route to a good outcome inseparable from the capability being developed. Participants should succeed because they interpret the information well, make coherent trade-offs, communicate effectively, and adapt intelligently - not because they discover a shortcut in the scoring model. Competition may create useful pressure, but winning outcomes cannot be the only measure of performance. The platform must distinguish individual behaviour from team outcomes and capture enough evidence to show why someone performed strongly, not simply where their team finished.
Learning simulations and assessment simulations require different conditions
The same underlying scenario can support learning and assessment, but the two uses are not identical.
In a learning simulation, it may be appropriate to provide hints, coaching, repeated attempts, adaptive support, and detailed feedback during the experience. The purpose is to help the participant improve.
In an assessment simulation, participants should normally face sufficiently consistent conditions, receive clear instructions, and be evaluated against defined, job-relevant criteria. The purpose is to produce comparable evidence of current capability.
This means that a simulation does not become a valid assessment merely because it is realistic or engaging. The assessed tasks must reflect meaningful elements of the role, and every score should be connected to observable decisions, behaviours, interactions, or outcomes. A credible simulation-based assessment should therefore provide:
- tasks that reflect meaningful parts of the role;
- clear and sufficiently consistent conditions for participants;
- assessment criteria connected to the capabilities required in the job;
- evidence showing which actions or decisions contributed to each score;
- enough context for candidates to understand what they are being asked to do;
- a way to distinguish individual performance from team performance; and
- a clear distinction between trainable technical knowledge and the underlying judgment or potential the employer wants to assess.
Where simulations add less value
At the same time, some foundational knowledge is genuinely better acquired through traditional study first. Learning a definition, a formula, a regulation, or an accounting standard is often faster through direct instruction than through discovery.
Simulations may also be unnecessary when:
- the task has one simple and stable answer;
- the required behaviour can already be practised safely and cheaply in the real environment;
- the scenario cannot reproduce the constraints that materially shape the real decision;
- the learning or assessment objective is too vague to determine what the simulation should develop or measure;
- participants receive no meaningful feedback or opportunity to reflect;
- the result depends mainly on specialist knowledge that participants were never expected to possess;
- the scoring model cannot separate good reasoning from luck or team effects; or
- complexity is being added mainly to make the activity feel impressive.
A weak simulation is less useful than a strong case study, structured interview, practical exercise, or conventional lesson. It adds activity without necessarily adding insight. Simulations should also not be treated as a complete replacement for supervised workplace experience or human judgment. They can prepare someone for real work, expose gaps, accelerate pattern recognition, and provide structured evidence. They cannot reproduce every consequence, relationship, political consideration, or organisational history that shapes a live decision.
The strongest approach is usually blended
The best results usually come from combining methods.
For learning, traditional instruction can establish the groundwork before a simulation requires participants to apply it under realistic conditions. Direct instruction can explain what a concept means. A worked example can demonstrate how it is applied. A simulation can then test whether the learner knows when to use it, which assumptions to question, how it interacts with other considerations, and whether the learner can still apply it when the situation is ambiguous or pressured.
There is one important exception on the learning side. A number of our elementary simulations are built around a pure learning-by-doing approach and require no prior grounding at all - concepts like the time value of money or reading a financial statement are introduced and taught as the participant works through them. In these simulations, the challenge is deliberately bounded and support is provided at the point it is needed. Someone completely new to the topic can start, learn the fundamentals by doing, and finish with both conceptual understanding and applied practice.
For hiring, a job simulation can provide strong work-sample evidence, while structured interviews, eligibility checks, and other relevant information answer questions the simulation was not designed to answer. The purpose is not to force one tool to measure everything, but to use each method for the decisions it is best equipped to support.