On January 13th, the 2023-2024 Guangdong Provincial Vocational College Student Skills Competition in Smart Finance concluded successfully at Shenzhen Polytechnic University (SZPU). Sponsored by the Guangdong Provincial Department of Education and organized by the School of Economics at SZPU, the competition saw participation from 84 teams, totaling over 300 competitors from 48 vocational colleges across Guangdong Province. After intense competition, two teams from SZPU both won the first prize at the provincial level.

The competition was a team event, with each participating team consisting of four members. It featured three modules: "Financial Professionalism", "Comprehensive Financial Skills", and "Digital Finance Services", comprehensively evaluating the comprehensive financial skills, innovative thinking abilities, professional ethics, and professional qualities of vocational college students. The competition aimed to promote teaching, learning, and improvements through competition, cultivating more high-quality technical and skilled talents for the finance industry.

The "Comprehensive Financial Skills" module primarily assessed competitors' abilities in handling financial services like digital currency, inclusive finance, and green finance under the backdrop of smart finance, including banking, securities, and insurance services. This competition unit included role-specific operations such as lobby manager, comprehensive counter, customer manager, and wealth manager roles.

The "Financial Professionalism" module evaluated competitors' understanding and application of information technologies like big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and their grasp of basic financial operations skills. Financial professionalism encompasses "business literacy" and "professional skills", where "business literacy" covers fundamental knowledge of financial services, legal basics of financial business, professional behavior codes for financial practitioners, and basic knowledge of fintech, including business operation-related basics. "Professional skills" include tasks such as digital entry of vouchers, character entry, manual cash counting, and currency anti-counterfeiting and identification.

The "Digital Finance Services" module designed competition tasks based on different fintech application scenarios. Competitors were required to assume various roles within each competition unit, collaborating to complete tasks, mainly assessing their mastery of professional skills in digital finance service scenarios.

(School of Economics, Yu Haixu, Li Changsheng)