Four Year-3 students from SMU School of Information Systems have clinched the first prize in the UBS Group Chief Operation Office (GCOO) Case Challenge 2019.

Team Tortoise Honey, comprising Bryan Tan Wei Yoong, Dionysus Yan Hong Chen, Loh Yu Jin, and Michelle Firstania Lion, had bested four other teams in the finals held at UBS Singapore on 8 August to walk away with $700 Capitaland mall vouchers and an invitation to fast track their application to the UBS 2020 Summer Internship Programme.

The team was challenged to re-engineer the remittance process of a fictitious bank to improve its efficiency. Their proposed solution included a web portal where the client can request for remittance payment and submit relevant documents. It also included an integrated ticketing system which enables an employee to pass each transaction downstream - from form submission to sum disbursement. The team also provided a breakdown of the implementation costs and phases of project execution as part of their overall proposal.

Putting their classroom knowledge to good use, especially the Enterprise Solution Design & Enterprise Solution Management modules, the team’s solution incorporated a service-oriented architecture and several technological features, including six-digit verification technology for verifying transactions, design of digital forms, a security suite to enhance the protection of data and applications, as well as the automation of most of the manual tasks in the remittance process.

The finalists were judged on a number of criteria, including research & analysis, innovation, technology components, operations components, and financial analysis.

Dionysus Yan said, “We decided to embark on this competition because it looked fun and meaningful. It is relevant to our studies and for some of us, our passion in digital transformation and the Fintech industry. “We learnt a lot from the other finalists and staff of UBS. We saw the whys and hows of their solutions and picked up strategies that we could use in the future. More importantly, we affirmed our hunch that a realistic solution is far more implementable and hence attractive to businesses. Companies want to harness the power technology as fast as possible and staying grounded in our solution helps to achieve that.”

Featured photo: The SMU team (L-R) Loh Yu Jin, Bryan Tan and Dionysus Yan received the top prize from Mr Keith Yong of UBS Group Operations. The fourth team member Michelle Firstania Lion is not in the photo. [Photo: UBS]