Debate Scenario · Fictional case

Meridia Bank
has too many projects.

A profitable mid-sized Spanish bank. A finite budget. A board that does not agree on what should win.

The bank

Meridia Bank is a mid-sized Spanish retail bank. Founded in Valencia in 1987, listed on BME Madrid, headquartered in Madrid since 2003. Around 4,800 employees and 320 branches in Spain. Profitable, but margins have been compressing for three years.

Profit last year
€180M (down 8% from the year before)
Profitability
has dropped from 11% to 7% since 2022
People visiting branches
down 24% since 2022
Young customers (under 35)
about 8% lost to fintech apps in two years

The pressure

Three large fintech apps are slowly stealing Meridia's young customers. Younger people are the future of any bank because they eventually need mortgages, savings products, and investment advice. If Meridia keeps losing them, the problem will only get worse over the next decade.

At the same time, new European regulations on sustainability, cybersecurity, and capital requirements will force the bank to spend roughly €38M over three years just to comply. That money does not produce any return. It simply has to be spent.

And then there is the technology problem. Meridia's core software, the system that runs every account and every transaction, is twenty-three years old. Replacing it would cost €240M and take four years, with a real chance of going badly wrong. Several other banks have tried similar projects and failed.

Eighteen months ago the board hired a new CEO and asked her to transform the bank. The board now disagrees on what that actually means.

The decision

The Portfolio Committee has approximately €95M to allocate across next year's projects. Candidates split roughly into two categories:

Financial-return projects with measurable NPV (Net Present Value, the expected profit of a project expressed in today's money) and clear payback periods: mortgage automation, branch optimization, SME (small and medium enterprise) expansion in Portugal, fraud detection using machine learning, customer service automation, wealth management platform.

Strategic-alignment projects with weak or unquantifiable financial cases: core banking modernization, the under-30 mobile app, AI credit scoring, the data lake (a central repository for all the bank's data), embedded finance pilots (offering banking services through other companies' apps), brand repositioning.

Plus regulatory work that is simply non-negotiable.

The room

Head of
Finance
"We are a bank, not a venture fund. Rank by Net Present Value, draw the line, fund what pays back."
Head of
Strategy
"Sixty percent of the budget must go to transformation. The fintechs are not waiting for our payback periods."
CEO
"Both of you are right and both of you are wrong. The board wants a number by the end of the month."