Arctic Fox Products
Introducing
Fox Forecast
Arctic Fox Technologies Has Released Fox Forecast 1.0, a Competitive Banking Simulation Where Student Banks Now Merge With Each Other
Fox Forecast is a bank balance-sheet management and forecasting simulator built for graduate schools of banking, executive education programs, and internal bank leadership development.
Banking schools are under pressure to teach more in fewer days away from the bank. Fox Forecast answers that by compressing the management cycle: teams run competing banks through an economy the instructor designs, price the book product by product, answer to a regulator, and find out at the end of every turn who won the market. A turn resolves the moment every team commits, so a class gets through several rounds in a day rather than one.
Version 1.0 marks the point where the simulation covers the full arc of bank management — from pricing a single deposit product to negotiating, approving, and executing a merger with a rival team, then competing as the combined institution.
What’s in Fox Forecast 1.0
Mergers & acquisitions between student banks
The headline capability of this release. Teams can now model, negotiate, and actually execute a merger with another bank in the game — not as a side exercise, but inside the live simulation.
- A guided deal model covering consideration (stock, cash, or a mix), premium, synergies, and holding-company funding assumptions.
- Live valuation for every candidate partner — EPS, book value per share, market cap, P/E, P/B, ROA, ROE, and equity-to-assets — computed from each bank’s real book, so students negotiate against figures they can defend.
- An offer-and-counter workflow: one team makes an offer, the other counters or accepts, with the economics of both sides visible.
- Real guardrails. A premium generous enough to hand control away shows up as exactly that; a deal that breaks holding-company leverage limits shows up as exactly that.
- On acceptance the books genuinely combine and the game continues — the merged bank competes in the next turn against the rivals that watched it happen.
- Merger results carry full reports, so the deal can be defended in class the same way any other decision can.
A deeper, more realistic bank
- Business plans each team writes for itself — which the AI assistant advises against and every turn recap is graded on.
- Loan loss reserves and tax rates modeled explicitly, so provisioning and after-tax returns behave the way they do in a real institution.
- Fee income alongside net interest income.
- Stock and shareholder mechanics, which is what makes an equity-funded merger legible.
- Rate-curve modeling feeding pricing and rate-sensitivity analysis.
Instructor control over the economy
- Design the session to fit the calendar — four turns or twenty, with the economic environment authored on each one: fed funds and the direction of the move, curve shape, unemployment, inflation, growth, and market size.
- A library of shocks — sector crises, deposit runs, cyber events — with severity, targeting down to a single slice of the balance sheet.
- Amortized events, new in this release: a shock can begin several turns out and dissipate over several more, so a slow burn behaves like a slow burn instead of a one-turn cliff.
- Conditional events that spare the bank that prepared — the team carrying cyber insurance is exempt from the breach; the team with a loan concentration above the threshold is not.
- Seed banks: start each team from a different template, matched to where its people actually work.
- Full Excel round-trip — author an entire semester offline, bulk-import banks, rosters, turns, factors, and events, and export a finished game back out to clone into the next cohort.
Reports that explain themselves
Balance sheet, income statement, NIM analysis, credit risk, rate sensitivity, management ratios, expenses, and community reports — every one of them quarter-aware and exportable to Excel and PDF. Open any figure and drill through to the formula, its inputs, and the inputs of those. A regulatory examination dashboard grades the bank the way an examiner would, against the same drill-downs, and runs over a forecast as readily as over today’s book — so a team can ask whether a strategy still leaves them well-capitalized before they commit to it.
An AI assistant that proposes, never acts
Students get a bank-decisions co-pilot that reads their history and regulatory position and suggests scenario changes as review-and-confirm cards — the student applies or dismisses. Instructors get a game-design co-pilot that can draft turns, events, and conditions as a single confirmable plan. The assistant also writes the turn outlooks students see and the recaps they get afterward, restricted to public economic signals so it can never leak the mechanics or the shock that’s coming.
Explainable by construction
Every turn the engine runs is fully audited. The Market Share Decision Engine distributes market growth competitively on price, and records phase by phase — runoff, maturities, growth rate, market share, events, value change — the exact math for each product for each bank, in plain language. An instructor can show a team precisely why they won or lost share. Grades built on the simulation are defensible because the arithmetic is on the record.