IS484 IS Project Experience (FinTech)
Contents
Course Description:
IS484 is cancelled for AY2021/22 Term 2. Will resume in AY2022/23 Term 1.
Please seek sponsors and plan for IS483 for AY2021/22 Term 2.
- This is an SMU-X course designed in collaboration with participating Banks, FinTechs, and other FIs, to serve as project sponsors. Collectively, industry sponsors will supply a minimum of 5 projects ideas to select from.
- Students will form teams of 5 or 6, and select one the project ideas to work on. Project selections do not need to be unique, meaning multiple teams can select the same project idea.
- Each student project team will be assigned to a sponsor/mentor and an SMU faculty supervisor.
- Sponsors will provide project scope and management for student teams to have practical industry learning experiences.
- Student teams will have weekly check in meetings, either virtually or physically, with their sponsor.
- Sponsors will specify the technologies to be used, including; development tools/languages, OS, database, 3rd party libraries, target deployment environment e.g. cloud environment.
- Student project teams will be expected to develop a working software application prototype, to be delivered to the sponsor at the end of the course.
Project Timeline:
| Activities | Timeline | Term 1/ Term 2 | Action By |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project Sourcing and Registration | Week -16 to Week -8 | Form teams. Review the below set of predefined projects provided by CitiVentures. Fill up the Project Team Signup Sheet at the below link, listing your preferred projects. FT Track Coordinator will finalize the matching of teams to projects. | Students |
| Proposal | Due before the start of Week -8 | Submit your project proposals to your Track Coordinator(s). For mixed-track teams, both track coordinators need to review your proposal. | Students |
| Decision on Proposal | Week -4 | Presentation. Your Track Coordinator(s) will confirm that the project has sufficient scope to fulfill your respective track requirements for IS Project Experience. | Track Coordinator, Students, (Optional: Sponsor) |
| Start of Project | Week 1 | Supervisor - Teams | Student |
| Midterm | Week 7 to 9 | Presentation | Students, Supervisor, Reviewer (Optional: Sponsor, Track Coordinator) |
| Finals | Week 13 to Week 16 | Presentation | Students, Supervisor, Reviewer (Optional: Sponsor, Track Coordinator) |
IS484 Project Wiki:
Project teams to maintain their documentation here:
IS484 Project Wiki Home Page
Project Team Signup Sheet:
AY2020/21 Term 1
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IDAhC4JiK3RuKnIDQMG5UjJ6I1IiImo81Lu13wAuUxE/edit?usp=sharing
AY2020/21 Term 2 - CANCELED
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IDAhC4JiK3RuKnIDQMG5UjJ6I1IiImo81Lu13wAuUxE/edit#gid=1043528005 - CANCELED
AY2021/22 Term 1
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IDAhC4JiK3RuKnIDQMG5UjJ6I1IiImo81Lu13wAuUxE/edit#gid=86226209
AY2021/22 Term 2 - CANCELED
AY2022/23 Term 1
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IDAhC4JiK3RuKnIDQMG5UjJ6I1IiImo81Lu13wAuUxE/edit#gid=155160571
Current Projects
| Item | Project Sponsor | Project Description | Project Deliverables | Project Stakeholders |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | OCBC | Online Business Account Maintenance - Business Banking provides SME & Corporate customers with a broad range of Cash & Trade products and services. Through our Digital Business Banking channels, customers are able to manage cash, loans, trade finance and perform transactions in their day-to-day business. The current account maintenance form is in PDF for customers to download. Once customer fills up the form, they will email the scan copy to operations. This process takes at least a few days to complete and incurs operation overhead. The task is to digitize the online business account maintenance services:
|
Project sponsors will share sufficient context so students can understand how/where this UI brings value to the customers. The sample pdf form, explanation of the validations and other useful details will be shared. |
Project Coordinator: Lim Dedy Daryono |
| 2 | OCBC | Host-to-Host (H2H) Modernization - Business Banking provides SME & Corporates customer with a broad range of Cash & Trade products and services. Through our H2H integration, customers are able to integrate with their ERP/Accounting system to perform transactions with the bank. The current H2H solution is a secured file transfer channel which supports file transfers between customers and the bank over the internet. Currently there is excessive overhead in managing folder & access controls, as there are thousands of folders that need to be maintained. In addition, H2H integration is scheduled instead of event based, and this also incurs high maintenance overhead. The task is to modernize the H2H setup & maintenance:
|
Project sponsors will share sufficient context so students can understand how/where the new H2H integration will benefit the customers. |
Project Coordinator: Lim Dedy Daryono |
| 3 | OCBC | Blockchain Applications - GO&T serves as trusted partner to co-create new business capabilities, protect technology infrastructure, manage Group’s IT operations, and run regional processing hubs. Currently there is wide range of documents used by different teams in GO&T, there’s no efficient and automated method for verifying the latest version of documents, retrieval of documents and checking authenticity. This creates operational overhead for staff who rely on getting the approved documents done by other teams. On the NFT digital assets front, due to strong demand on NFT assets, there is no standardized way and repeatable process for production of NFT assets. Business users are not able to iterate fast on digital assets creation to meet demand by customers. The task is to design and develop blockchain applications for use cases such as:
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Project sponsors will share sufficient context so students can understand how and where the blockchain applications can benefit the end users. The sample documents, explanation of the validations and other useful details will be shared. |
Project Coordinator: Lim Dedy Daryono |
| 4 | Citibank | Commodities Pricing - The Commodities Pricing Platform (Atlas) is a Sales and Trader facing application that provides timely pricing across all Commodities asset classes. The user interface is mainly configuration driven and uses a highly dynamic rule engine to represent relationships between user inputs. These configurations are used as inputs to the rules engine to define products, their defaults and what data transformations should occur based on user inputs. The configuration files the pricing platform uses can span thousands of lines of JSON. Updating this JSON manually represents an operational risk. The aim of this project is to structure the update process and reduce this risk. | Students will be asked build a UI that will:
Project sponsors will share sufficient context so students can understand how/where this application brings value to users. The data will be shared and an explanation of this data structure and other useful details will be available. |
Project Coordinator: Ronnie Day |
| 5 | Citibank | Preventive Cross-Platform Risk Assessment (II) - An AI machine learning platform is needed to provide risk assessments of cross application health status and predictions of downtime, based on realtime access to applications through-put performance data, in order to provide an end-to-end cross platform health assessment including daily average volume vs realtime system load. Students are tasked to build a UI with a dashboard that provides a realtime view of platform health status, leveraging machine learning/ deep learning algorithms to suggest and predict potential system downtime, potential SLA breaches, and identify trigger points /bottle necks. | Students will be tasked to build a UI that will provide:
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Project Coordinator: TBD |
| 6 | Citibank | Equities Chatbot - Citi Equities trading platform receives several queries on a daily basis. The queries currently are being sent and answered through email, symphony chat, Bloomberg chat etc. and an associate’s manual efforts are required to generate a response; either running database queries to fetch results, or leveraging their product knowledge and judgement to make predictions. This project is to create an AI chatbot to automate the process and replicate the efforts of an associate replying to queries received by the Equities team. The AI chatbot is expected to interact with traders and answer their queries. The bot must be capable of:
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Students will be tasked to build the following:
Project Inputs:
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Project Coordinator: TBD |
| 7 | Citibank | Pending - Project description pending | Pending:
Project Coordinator: Dossii, Shailej P |
Archived Projects (no longer available)
| Item | Project Sponsor | Project Description | Project Deliverables | Project Stakeholders |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| X | Citibank | Derivative & Structured Product Performance Dashboard - Derivative & Structured products are complex and its crucial for Bankers and investment counselors to have a consistent view for how these products perform for our clients. Apart from product performance it’s important to know product lifecycle events and any risks that may be detrimental to private bank clients. This dashboard will allow visualization of such complex information in an organized and intuitive manner.
Bankers and Investment counselors (ICs) act on market trends and guidance from research teams to create customized financial products for clients. These products are created to cater to a variety financial risks and client preferences. |
The ask is to create an analytics dashboard that:
|
Project Coordinator: Kulkarni, Kaushik |
| X | Citibank | Preventive Cross-Platform Risk Assessment - Multiple applications are constructed together to support one of the largest Custodian banking platforms. Any of the components malfunctioning will affect productivity and also lead to a breach of the market deadline. We are seeking for an AI risk monitoring and assessment tool to enhance the platform resilience to another level.
AI machine learning Platform to provide risk assessment of cross application health status and prediction of downtime. To do this, they need real time access of:
|
Students will be tasked to build a UI which:
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Project Coordinator: Ho, Ricky |
| X | Citibank | (Old name: Document Scrutiny using a Rules Engine)
Document processing using Cognitive OCR - Currently the Document Scrutiny process is a manual task which requires human intervention for regulatory validations. This process is error prone and time consuming. A Rules Engine is need with these features:
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A solution or program which can accomplish the following:
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Project Coordinator: Gupta, Arvind |
| X | Citibank | Predictive Analysis of Risk Utilization - Phase II - Predictive Analysis of Risk Utilization enables Citi's clients and client facing officials to prevent regulatory violations, navigate trading disruptions by proactively take measures to prevent such breaches by allocating funds or by changing their trading strategy.
|
Students executing this project will be expected to arrive at comparative machine learning solutions (Random Forest, LTSM and SVM) to predict imminent movement of the risk parameters based on historical trading patterns. Tasks include:
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Project Coordinator: Dossii, Shailej P |
| X | Citibank | Equities Pre-Trade Booking Reconciliation - Equities Pre-Trade Booking is a manual task at present involving exchange dropcopy feeds, Citi’s internal trade feed for each client. The objective is to develop a tool where clients can review and confirm trades for a given product and market irrespective of execution brokers using exchange dropcopy and broker level reconciliation using blockchain which can be shared across brokers. | Equities Pre-Trade Booking Reconciliation using Blockchain Ethereum 2.0
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Project Coordinator: Dossii, Shailej P |
| X | Citibank | Machine Learning Model Performance - Machine learning models are being trained based on historical data. But in the commercial world, change is expected rapidly which may mark the model biased to the new data as well as scaled old data. Before the model is retained, there are immediate needs to understand what are the leverages that can be applied to interfere with the old model output to achieve the accuracy rate, then capture the business opportunity in a very short turnaround time. When models are unable to digest new data, they will generate inaccurate recommendations and predictions to the business, resulting in missing the opportunities for increased revenue. | A solution or program which can accomplish the following:
|
Yuqian Song, Head of APAC/EMEA Data Services and Head of Global Advanced Analytics Technology Solutions |
| X | Citibank | Robo-Advisor - Student defined project. A robo-advisor that will; classify customers based on their investment experience and risk appetite, recommend a portfolio of investments to customers, provide visualizations / analysis of the customer's investment portfolio, and provide a budgeting and savings dashboard as an extension or the above. | A solution or program which can accomplish the following:
|
Ravinder Rao, Senior Vice President, GCT Data & Analytics |
| X | Citibank | Private Banking Client Dashboard - Citi Private Bank (CPB) Investment Counsellors and Advisors provide frequent consultation to HNWI and UHWNI (high and ultra-high net-worth individuals) on how to manage their Investment portfolios. In order to perform their job they need high speed access to a client's positions, real-time market data and publicly available sentiment on the portfolio's constituents. The portfolio is usually composed of capital market securities and various funds (hedge, mutual, real estate, private equity). Careful thought needs to be put into providing an enriching UX / UI and leveraging machine / deep learning capability to provide robust recommendations. The users will use the information to pro-actively and also reactively service CPB's HNWI and UHNWI clients. | A working dashboard that provides a real-time view of a client's position. The view should be contextual based on the type of holdings (Cash/Liabilities, Equity, Fixed Income, Derivatives and Alternative Investments). The view would give an instrument and profitability analysis based on market data (Bloomberg / Reuters). Furthermore, there will be a recommendation engine that looks at a client's current / past positions and suggests trade-able ideas to the advisor based on upcoming announcements, trending public sentiment and client's personal interests. |
Kashif Awan, Private Bank Capital Markets APAC Technology Head kashif.awan@citi.com |
| X | Citibank | Predictive Analysis of Risk Utilization - Citi's institutional clients place millions of orders on any given trading day through its electronic execution platforms. As orders come in through Citi's systems, they are evaluated against several risk parameters(such as credit limits) before the order is sent to the market. While currently, breaches in these parameters can be identified the moment the orders are placed, the next gen evolution of this risk management system requires predictive analytics of such breach events. This will enable Citi's clients and client facing officials to prevent regulatory violations, navigate trading disruptions by proactively take measures to prevent such breaches by allocating funds/ changing their trading strategy etc. | Students executing this project will be expected arrive at a machine learning solution to predict imminent movement of the risk parameters based on historical trading patterns. The solution should be able to take data feed for supplemental information (Triple witching dates, FTSE/MSCI rebalancing, other events that affect the market such as the Coronavirus threat) to more accurately predict exceptional scenarios. Tasks:
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Sudeep Kumar, Global Exchange Connectivity & Asia Cash Equities Technology Lead |
| X | Citibank | Customer Mailing Address Analysis - Addresses of people and businesses contain important information about them. More data about the locations of those addresses is required to get some insight from addresses. For example the population, geographic and economic indicators, crime rates etc. can be helpful. We need to collect such information about countries and cities to make the addresses usable in models and other analytics. | A solution or program which can accomplish the following:
|
Yuqian Song, Head of APAC/EMEA Data Services and Head of Global Advanced Analytics Technology Solutions |
| X | Citibank | Marketing Audience Segmentation - Citibank sends merchants’ offers to the relevant customers. For example customers who often buy sports gear should get sports related offers and foodies should get offers from the restaurants. This requires accurate segmentation of customers as well as merchants. 3rd party data can be used to improve marketing audience segmentation. | A solution or program which can accomplish the following:
|
Yuqian Song, Head of APAC/EMEA Data Services and Head of Global Advanced Analytics Technology Solutions |
