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 -14 to Week -10 | Form teams. Review the below set of predefined projects provided by Citibank, OCBC or NETS. 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 |
| Project Matching | Week -10 | FT Track Coordinator will finalize the matching of teams to projects. | FT Track Coordinator |
| 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 | 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 8 | Presentation | Students, Supervisor, Reviewer (Optional: Sponsor, Track Coordinator) |
| Finals | Week 14 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 | NETS | Transform Internet Online Direct Debit via Web3.0 - Web 3.0 blockchain identity which offers privacy, control, openness and interoperability is a powerful catalyst to transform the usability and technology for Internet Online Direct Debit. The Web3.0 blockchain identity is a viable secure substitute for the end-user’s internet banking ID credentials and will also streamline the user experience for Internet Online Direct Debit from a Web2 to a Web3 experience. Students are asked to create a prototype which can accomplish the following:
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Students will be tasked to build a prototype which contains the following:
Project sponsors will share sufficient context so students can understand the context of internet online direct debit to enable the students to design suitable solutions to overcome the problem statement. A sample high level conceptual design, explanation of this roles and responsibilities of the components and other useful details will be available. |
Project Coordinator: David Woo Chee Keong |
| 2 | NETS | Interoperable QR payments using EMVCo QR - EMVCo QR implementations currently requires consumers to download and deposit funds in multiple payment apps in order to pay to the whole spectrum of EMVCo QR merchants as opposed to only needing to use their favorite payment app. EMVCo QR merchants need to sign-up, settle and reconcile with multiple payment providers as opposed to a single party. EMVCo QR labels currently need to be replaced physically when a merchant decides to ADD or REMOVE QR payment options. Students are asked to create an interoperable payment solution using EMVCo QR which can accomplish the following:
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Students are expected to deliver a prototype as follows:
Project sponsors will share sufficient context so students can understand EMVCo QR and the QR payment landscape to enable the students to design suitable solutions to overcome the problem statements. A sample high level conceptual design, explanation of this roles and responsibilities of the components and other useful details will be available. |
Project Coordinator: David Woo Chee Keong |
| 3 | NETS | Car Park As-A-Service - Parking can be costly especially for car users/owners who need to hop across multiple car parks for work across multiple locations within to carry out their daily business or work activities. Current season parking arrangements are also inflexible and requires the car users/owners to commit a recurring fee to only one car park location. During peak hours it can also be extremely time consuming for car users/owners to queue and seek for available car park lots.
Carpark as a service is a new service concept which allows a car park operator to rent physical car park spaces from real-estate property owners and to offer use of these car park spaces to subscribers of this service for a one-time or recurring fee. This allows a car park operator to provide car park services across multiple private car parks across the city without the need to own or rent a complete physical car park. This also allows car users/owners to subscribe to a contemporary digital car park service which allows them flexible membership and subscription options which can apply across all available car parks offered by the service including pre-booking, notification of availability etc. |
Students are expected to deliver a prototype as follows:
Project sponsors will share sufficient context so students can understand the context of the car park payment service to enable the students to design suitable solutions to overcome the problem statements. A sample high level conceptual design, explanation of this roles and responsibilities of the components and other useful details will be available. Project sponsors will provide a baseline car park ecosystem simulator which allows the students to further enhance and develop to incorporate the required use cases and data model to support the business model simulation and machine / deep learning. |
Project Coordinator: David Woo Chee Keong |
| 4 | Vertex Holdings | AI Augmented Analysis of Financial Statements - Processing and analyzing management reports and financial statements of start-ups, existing portfolio companies and publicly listed organizations are a critical part of making investments. These reports however are typically in semi-structured data formats, requiring human intelligence to extract and process relevant content.
This project seeks to explore the possibility of leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate the extraction, processing and interpretation of structured and unstructured content from business and financial reports to augment the investment analyst. |
Students are expected to deliver a prototype as follows:
Project sponsors will share sufficient context so students can understand how/where this UI brings value to users. Project team will provide samples of business and financial reports for processing. |
Project Coordinator: Joey Chua |
| 5 | Vertex Holdings | Company Smart News Monitoring - Investment managers need to keep abreast on latest news and developments relevant to companies they have invested in order to stay on top of their game. Current news monitoring is typically company keyword based e.g., "Vertex Holdings" which only surfaces news of direct relevance to the organization. However, various news events such as those regarding competitors, industry relevant information are important for managers to be aware about. This project will involve designing and developing a module for investment managers to review, track, and read key news items that affects the companies they have or plan to invest in. | Students are expected to deliver a prototype as follows:
Project sponsors will share sufficient context so students can understand how/where this UI brings value to users. |
Project Coordinator: Joey Chua |
| 6 | Vertex Holdings | Robo-advisory for Go-To-Market - Investment Managers not only invest in companies, but also help with the companies’ business development in different countries. However, this not only requires significant time to search for vendors/customers, but also require local knowledge of each country e.g., how businesses operates. Currently, this requires a lot of manual effort and individual knowledge to put together. We envisage an AI augmentation tool to support this task. | Students are expected to deliver a prototype as follows:
Project sponsors will share sufficient context so students can understand how/where this UI brings value to users. Provide list of portfolio companies and the industry the companies are in. |
Project Coordinator: Joey Chua |
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:
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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:
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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:
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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:
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Yuqian Song, Head of APAC/EMEA Data Services and Head of Global Advanced Analytics Technology Solutions |
| X | 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:
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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 |
| X | 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:
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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 |
| X | 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 |
| X | 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: Dossii, Shailej P |
| X | 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: Dossii, Shailej P |
| X | 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: Dossii, Shailej P |
| X | Citibank | Data Aggregator - Reporting and Statements generation across various countries within Citi is a critical operation for client and service operations within Citi. There is a high level of data redundancy (multiple copies of the same data), manual dependency from operations users to input data, and untimely data availability. In some cases, this becomes a regulatory concern. Students executing this project will be expected to build a middleware application that is capable of extracting data points on demand from various source or upstream systems. The objective is to build a Report On Demand (ROD) framework that can serve as a self-service fully autonomous tool for operations users, to enable:
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Features of this solution to include:
Note: The data sources typically are Oracle, MSSQL and No-SQL databases. This can be further extended to File store, HDFS etc. Project sponsor will share further context on the various pain points and priorities of the problem statement. Specific use will be defined and shared with the students too. |
Project Coordinator: Dossii, Shailej P |
| X | Citibank | Enabling Efficient On-the-job Training with AI - Citi Commercial Bank (CCB) plans to hire hundreds of staff over the next three years to fast-track growth. It is crucial that new hires joining CCB are brought up to speed efficiently on company and role-specific processes and day-to-day functions. A large part of this is done through on-the-job training, where new hires learn more about the various processes, digital platforms and resources as they do their daily work. However, given the complex nature of the business (and hence its processes and systems), it is not always easy for new hires to learn on-the-job. The ask is to create on-the-job training resource(s) and platform for employees where Line Managers / L&D partners can easily:
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Students are expected to deliver:
Project sponsor will share further context on the various pain points and priorities around onboarding and training new hires. Specific use case and target audience personas will be defined and shared with the students too. |
Project Coordinator: Dossii, Shailej P |
| X | Citibank | Data APIs using Low Code - Lots of our data sourcing is driven from embedding SQL or Logic in Stored procedures. This makes the application logic heavily dependent on data which sometimes is not even owned by the given service. Accessing data in an easy way within a distributed platform is a big challenge. A low-code development platform (LCDP) provides a development environment used to create application software through a graphical user interface. A low-coded platform may produce entirely operational applications, or require additional coding for specific situations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-code_development_platform The objective is to develop Data APIs using Low code technology automation. This is an agile way of software development. It will deliver easy access of our data (reference / product / transactional) to our Web, Mobile UI and reposting modules. |
Students are expected to deliver:
Project learnings:
Project sponsors will share sufficient context so students can understand how current data flow works and what we expect from the APIs, and details about Low code products which can be used by Citi. |
Project Coordinator: Dossii, Shailej P |
