SMU School of Information Systems (SIS) has signed an agreement with DBS Bank on 21 October 2015 to set up a joint lab to conduct large-scale consumer behaviour analysis on online social platforms to provide better financial services.

The agreement was signed by SMU Vice Provost (Research) and SIS Dean Professor Steven Miller and Ms Tan Su Shan, Group Head for Consumer Banking and Wealth Management at DBS. SMU Professor Francis Koh, Vice Provost (Special Projects) and Mr Sameer Gupta, Head of Business Analytics and Customer Experience at DBS, signed as witnesses.

This is the first time that SIS has established a joint lab with a bank focused on advanced R&D.

The DBS-SMU Life Analytics Lab, or LifeLab, will be physically situated in SMU and staffed by about 10 researchers. They will process data gleaned from publicly available sources such as Facebook and Twitter to uncover new digital consumer trends. This, when combined with DBS' in-house databank and analytics expertise, will help the bank create new products, improve current offerings, and identify new marketing opportunities.

For consumers, they will benefit from better financial services enabled by a deeper understanding of their behaviour and insight into their potential financial needs.

Professor Miller said, “SMU has made great progress over the past six years in establishing Analytics for Business, Consumer and Social Insights as an Area of Excellence for the university. The agreement to launch the joint DBS-SMU Life Analytics Lab is yet one more external acknowledgement of SMU’s progress in the area of Analytics. It is also another demonstration of SMU’s proactive approach of working with industry on real-world, highly relevant problems.”

SIS Assistant Professor Zhu Feida, who is the director of LifeLab, said “In an age when everyone is talking about big data, LifeLab will take a more grounded approach by focusing on research and projects that would actually bring value out of social big data and connecting state-of-the-art research with real-world applications to explore a new data-driven technology-enabled paradigm for business and financial innovation.”

Over the past few years, the various labs at SIS, such as the Living Analytics Research Centre, Livelabs and Pinnacle Lab, have strengthened their research capabilities and generated a wealth of research through a wide range of projects on consumer behaviour analysis, user community and network analysis, information diffusion pattern mining and mobile data analysis. The expertise and experience gained from these projects would be valuable for the projects undertaken by LifeLab.

[Caption: The agreement to set up DBS-SMU Life Analytics Lab was inked by SMU Professor Steven Miller (second from left) and DBS Ms Tan Su Shan (second from right). With them are SMU Professor Francis Koh (extreme left) and and DBS Mr Sameer Gupta (extreme right).] (Photo: DBS)