4 NUS Master of Science Business Analytics students (MSBA) came together during the start of the semester to participate in the NUS Fintech Society Hackathon and unexpectedly came in 1st!
Ng Jian Lai, Hiroyuki Tsujikami, Yang Yue and Julian Ando, knew each other as course mates through the NUS MSBA programme. They chanced upon the hackathon and decided to tap on each other’s expertise and experience to give it a go. “We felt that taking part in a hackathon was a good opportunity to apply what we have learnt since it required us to consider both business and analytics aspects. In NUS MSBA, we learnt to strike a balance in both areas and that was likely one factor that contributed to our win.”
The hackathon was held by the NUS Fintech Society with the sponsorship from NUS Fintech Lab of the NUS School of Computing. Participants were required to propose solutions for anti-fraud detection within a multi-market, multi-entity corporate environment: How can a corporation detect fraud through a multitude of solution(s) in a digital or hybrid (digital and manual) operating environment? 8 finalists were shortlisted to pitch their solutions to a panel of judges made up of professors and experts in the FinTech Industry, namely, Edwin Chan – Head Of Transaction Banking Product Management, APAC at BNP Paribas, Hon Kok Wai – Director, Transaction Banking product management, APAC at BNP Paribas, Liu Genping – Partner, Vertex Ventures, Stanley Tan – Senior Portfolio Manager, FundedHere, and Stanley Kok – Assistant Professor at Department of Information Systems & Analytics, National University of Singapore.
The solutions were judged based on 5 criteria: i. the simplicity of the solution, ii. how it accommodated the client’s workflow, iii. user-friendliness, iv. effectiveness and robustness of the solution and v. the kind of analysis that was used to solve the problem statement.
The team was pleasantly surprised when they won as the other teams had submitted equally strong and reasonable proposals and had members from diversified backgrounds such as MBA and Computing.