Vennlisk: what to know for the SCS pre-seen

This is our own summary of the Vennlisk pre-seen for the CIMA Strategic Case Study (SCS), written to help you plan. It is not CIMA material. Download the official pre-seen from your AICPA-CIMA account, read it in full, and check everything here against it.

The company in brief

Vennlisk is a listed company that provides outsourced inbound call-centre services. Other organisations pay it to answer calls from their own customers.

That simple description carries a lot of strategy with it:

• It sells to businesses, not to the public. Its customers are its clients, and its reputation depends on how well it treats their customers. Losing one large client can matter a great deal.
• Its product is people. An inbound call centre is delivered by trained staff. Recruitment, training and keeping good people are not side issues; they are the business.
• It is listed. It has shareholders, a share price, a board with formal responsibilities and published principal risks. Every strategic choice has to be explained to the market.

The key themes in the pre-seen are:

• the threat and the opportunity of AI and automation
• staff training and retention
• the board and the company's principal risks
• competitors' results
• the share price history
• sustainability.

The first theme frames most of the others. Automation could take away the routine calls that a call-centre business is built on. It could also let Vennlisk offer clients something better and cheaper than before. Which of those happens depends on the choices the board makes, and that is exactly where your role sits.

Your role

You are a senior finance manager reporting to the board on special projects and strategy.

SCS is the top of the case study ladder. You are a trusted adviser to the board. Lead with the strategic consequence, and give a clear, justified recommendation whenever the task asks for one. The board doesn't want a list of every possible consideration; it wants your judgement, the reasons for it, the main risks and what should happen next.

Remember who is reading. Directors will think about shareholders, clients, staff, regulators and the company's reputation together. Your answers should too.

The syllabus at this level is E3, P3 and F3: strategic options and choices, digital and AI strategy, enterprise and cyber risk, financing and valuation, and stakeholder and ethical issues.

Key figures to know

Our summary holds very few numbers, on purpose: the figures are in the official document, not in our notes. The dates we can give you are these:

• The pre-seen was released on 2 October 2026.
• The November exam window starts on 18 November 2026.
• The February 2027 sitting uses the same pre-seen and ends on 19 February 2027. Check your own booking with CIMA.

As you read the pre-seen, build a one-page figures sheet in your own words. For a listed call-centre business, the useful figures are likely to be:

• Revenue, profit and margins over the years shown, and how they compare with the competitors' results.
• Staff costs as a share of total costs, and anything on staff turnover or training.
• How dependent revenue is on the largest clients, if the pre-seen tells you.
• The share price history, and any events it seems to react to.
• Borrowing, cash, dividends and anything else that limits how much the company could invest.
• Whatever the pre-seen says about sustainability targets or reporting.

Calculate a few comparisons yourself, such as margin against each competitor, growth rates and any obvious valuation measures. If the unseen gives you a new figure, a merger price or an investment cost, you need to know at once how big it is compared with the business.

Themes and likely triggers

Nobody outside CIMA knows what the unseen will contain. What the pre-seen does is open up themes, and these are the ones our Vennlisk practice tasks are built around:

• AI and automation strategy. Clients that might build their own AI tools, competitors that automate faster, and whether Vennlisk should lead, follow or specialise.
• Regulation of AI. New rules on how AI can be used in customer conversations, and what they mean for the strategy.
• Where to operate. Moving work to lower-cost locations against automating at home, and the people consequences of each.
• Cyber and fraud risk. Call centres handle personal and financial data. New technology brings new ways for criminals to impersonate customers.
• Data integrity. Service level figures reported to clients have to be right. What happens when they don't add up?
• Risk appetite. How much AI risk the board should accept, and how to say so in a way the business can act on.
• Client concentration. What happens if a large client leaves, and how to reduce the exposure.
• Valuation and acquisitions. Valuing a rival, responding to an approach from a buyer, and what the share price is telling you.
• Treasury. Currency risk on contracts in other currencies, and how to hedge it.
• Dividends and funding. Paying shareholders against investing in technology.
• Sustainability. Targets, sustainability-linked borrowing, and clients that require climate commitments in their tenders.
• Ethics and communication. Job cuts linked to automation, and who should be told what, and when.

Use this list to check that your revision covers the ground. Don't write answers in advance: the trigger in the unseen is why each task exists, and an answer that ignores it scores poorly.

How to prepare

Read the pre-seen twice. First for the story: what Vennlisk does, how it is doing and what is changing around it. Then read it as the board's adviser. What decisions are coming? Who wins and who loses from each?

Write the strategy in a paragraph. Say what Vennlisk does, how it earns money, what threatens that and what the opportunities are. If you can't, read the pre-seen again. That paragraph is the test you apply to every option in the exam.

Revise E3, P3 and F3 through Vennlisk. A strategic options framework is easier to use when you have already tried it on automation. A valuation method sticks when you have used it on a rival call-centre business.

Practise recommending. Many SCS candidates analyse well and then sit on the fence. When a task asks you to recommend, recommend: say what, why, the main risk and the next step.

Keep people in every answer. At this level the people and leadership competencies are about the board, the staff, clients and shareholders. Ask who is affected and how you would bring them with you.

Do timed practice early and often. Board-level writing is concise. That takes practice under time pressure, not just reading.

Sit full mocks. Three hours in exam order shows you where your time goes. Use what you learn to fix your timing before the real exam.

Review every answer. Did you answer the verb, use the trigger, tie each point to Vennlisk, consider stakeholders and give a clear recommendation where one was asked for? Rewrite the weakest paragraph before moving on.

Practise for Vennlisk

Our current SCS practice tasks are all set in Vennlisk, each with its own new trigger, as in the exam. You write as the senior finance manager on an exam-style screen and get marked in about a minute on the four competencies, with your own answer rewritten to the next level up and the reason for each change.

Your first task is free, with no card needed. For more about the level, see our Strategic Case Study page and our Vennlisk case study page.