Citi Ventures to offer experiential learning in fintech to Singapore students

The 15-week programme at SMU will launch in January 2020.

Singapore Management University (SMU) has tied up with Citi Ventures to offer Citi University Partnerships in Innovation & Discovery (CUPID) programme to its students. A first for a university in Asia, students can learn to apply classroom knowledge to real-world challenges faced by financial institutions.

The fifteen-week term programme at SMU will commence in January 2020. Students taking the Financial Technology Project Experience module, an SMU-X course which combines academic with experiential learning, will have the opportunity to participate in the programme and work on developing new product ideas, crafting customer experience solutions and building functional prototypes on blockchain, machine learning and AI.

"Our students will be able work in teams to apply their classroom knowledge to real-world challenges faced by financial institutions. These include opportunities to work on improving customer onboarding though digital channels, reducing transaction cycle times and error rates, and increasing product marketing yields though real-time customer analytics," SMU president professor Lily Kong said in a statement.

Launched in January 2018 in the US, the CUPID programme has engaged over 1,200 students from 20 universities in the US, Europe and Canada including Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University (Stern) and Stanford University.