Tutorial: SMU Teaching Bank: Enhancing classroom learning for digital banking and IT architecture related courses

• Main Author: MEGARGEL, Alan @ Ali MADJELISI
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2018
• Subjects: teaching; banking; classroom labs; gamification; information systems; IT architecture; Educational Methods; Finance and Financial Management; Higher Education; Systems Architecture
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6910
• Institution: Singapore Management University

SMU Teaching Bank (or “SMU tBank”), is a fully functioning online bank developed by students for teaching purposes, using today’s architecture best practices. The mission of SMU tBank is to become a world class “teaching bank”, generating an on-going supply of undergrad and postgrad student projects whereby classroom learning outcomes can be put into practice, leveraging industry leading banking software and enterprise platforms. SMU tBank is a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementation. Students develop banking applications (e.g.; Branch Teller, Internet Banking, Mobile Banking, General Ledger, Interbank Payments, etc.) that reuse services exposed via an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Using this architecture we are able to demonstrate large-scale change scenarios such as; a core banking system replacement, a new payments messaging standard, a bank merger whereby multiple vendor products need to coexist. SMU tBank is used in the classroom to teach banking concepts as well as architecture best practices. Students that develop SMU tBank gain a deep technical understanding of how a bank works. As well as gaining banking domain knowledge, students benefit from implementing industry best practices in enterprise architecture.