【Honor】Department of Information Management, NSYSU won champion of 3rd Artificial Intelligence Finance Challenge

With the emergence and development of financial technology, the financial industry has begun to apply the power of artificial intelligence to address practical problems and create business opportunities. In order to encourage young students to continuously come up with different ideas in the new era of financial technology and create new business opportunities in FinTech, the Department of Finance, the Management Studies Research Center, and the Intelligent Electronic Commerce Research Center, College of Management, National Sun Yat-sen University (NSYSU), teamed up with Taishin Bank to organize the “Business Model and Big Data Analytics Competition-”Artificial Intelligence Finance Challenge”. 2021 is the third year the competition is hosted. A total of 68 teams participated in this year’s competition and 14 teams entered the finals. Teams from the Department of Information Management and the Department of Finance, College of Management, NSYSU, and National Cheng Kung University won the top three places.

The theme of the 2021 competition is “Prediction of Optimal Financial Products”. Taishin Bank provided de-identified customer information. In addition to accurately predicting customers’ buying behavior through modeling, the participating teams also needed to propose innovative business models to market financial products. The champion team F.B.B. members included second-year master’s students: 陳芓僮 (Chen Zi-tong),陳朝昇 (Chen Chao-sheng), 陳崇華 (Chen Chong-hua), and 康為傑 (Kang Wei-jie), from the Department of Information Management. The team’s proposal explored the different financial needs of customers at different stages in life. Through the data-oriented decision-making process, they utilized “customer-centric” insights to discover the originally hidden information, identified the truly valuable information, and then planned the most suitable asset allocation for customers to maximize customer value. On top of that, they also used machine learning technology to build prediction models of asset changes through Feature Engineering, Selection Algorithms, and adjustment of Algorithm Parameters, analyze trends in a faster and more accurate way, and work out important features affecting customer asset changes.

Team leader 陳朝昇 (Chen Chao-sheng) said that they went through many stages when processing the data, including analyzing existing data, observing changes and trends among data, and identifying hidden variables. It is followed by “Feature Engineering Techniques” that use different methods to make up for omitted data and identify the important feature. Next, the most accurate result was obtained through different kinds of prediction models and clustering methods. Finally, according to the clustering results, specific financial product needs were then recommended for customers of different life stages. Taishin Bank’s Assistant General Manager 孔祥俊(Kong Xiang-jun) commented that “A good model is not necessarily a complicated model. What companies want is a simple and accurate model”. F.B.B. was favored by the judges because of its careful consideration and accuracy of prediction.

Most team members had taken financial case study classes and were familiar with the analysis model that is more suitable for banking data, and thus they could quickly begin the data processing process. Chen Zitong recalled that each time she received new data, there would be a series of variable adjustments and innovative marketing discussions. Repeated brainstorming allowed them to eventually come up with a proposal that was lauded by the judges. Chen Chonghua added that he was very excited to be able to apply what he learned in the classes of BIG DATA ANALYTICS and DATA MINING in the competition. Kang Weijie also said besides getting rewards for the hard work he put into this competition, what was more precious was idea exchanges and learning from elites across Taiwan, which was deemed “a precious lesson that is difficult to learn in class”.

The winning teams of College of Management, NSYSU:
Award: First place
Team name: F.B.B. Team
Team members: 陳芓僮 (Chen Zi-tong), 陳朝昇 (Chen Chao-sheng), 陳崇華 (Chen Chong-hua), and 康為傑 (Kang Wei-jie), from the master’s class at the Department of Information Management

Award: Second place
Team name: Taishin Supernova
Team members: 徐偉傑 (Xu Wei-jie), 黃鉉策 (Huang Xuan-ce ), 陳宥誠 (Chen You-cheng), and 賴光慶 (Lai Guang-qing), from the master’s class at the Department of Finance, and 呂怡慧 (Lu Yi-hui) from the master’s class of Industrial Technology Graduate Program in Financial Innovation Curriculum

Award: Outstanding
Team name: PaoPao wants to sleep (跑跑想睡覺)
Team members: 陳柏霖 (Chen Bolin) and 張慈恩 (Zhang Cien) from the master’s class at the Department of Finance, and 譚淞云 (Tan Song-yun) and 張曼瑄 (Zhang Man-xuan) from the master’s class of Industrial Technology Graduate Program in Financial Innovation Curriculum

Award: Outstanding
Team name: Corner lover
Team members: 馬承皓 (Ma Cheng-hao) and 林鶴倫 (Lin Helun) from the master’s class at the Department of Finance, and 徐藝瑄 (Xu Yi-xuan) from the master’s class of Industrial Technology Graduate Program in Financial Innovation Curriculum

Official announcement:  https://bba.cm.nsysu.edu.tw/final_result_2020.html