Deborah Lee
PhD Student, Information Systems
McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin
About
I am a PhD student in Information Systems at the McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin. I study how AI systems and digital platforms reshape decision-making inside organizations and competition between firms, using causal inference and large-scale behavioral data. Before the PhD I worked as a data scientist and generative AI engineer, building LLM systems for decision support in industry.
Research interests
Research
Opening Doors for Underdogs? The Impact of Open Banking on Competition Between Banks and Spillover Effects on the Mobile Financial Industry
- Asks who captures the gains when a regulator forces every bank to open its data to competitors: challengers, incumbents, or adjacent sectors.
- Identification uses Korea's open banking mandate as a natural experiment, with monthly app-level usage across 19 banks and 138 apps and a 24-month pre-period as the control.
- Engagement rises on the extensive margin, more visits rather than longer ones, and users spread across more banks at once. Switching away from internet-only banks falls most sharply, consistent with stronger lock-in there; a triple difference identifies spillovers into adjacent sectors.
Research Experience
KAIST ICON Lab, Graduate Researcher
- Built web-scraping pipelines for mobile-app usage data and assembled a reusable panel for the lab; supported empirical projects on digital platforms and fintech.
Seoul National University Hospital and KAIST, Research Assistant
- Literature review and market analysis on digital therapeutics and evidence-based healthcare technologies.
Samsung Electronics and KAIST, Next Generation Leaders Program, Research Assistant
- Synthesized research on emerging technologies for executive education.
Education
The University of Texas at Austin, PhD in Business, Information Systems
- Department of Information, Risk, and Operations Management
KAIST, M.S. in Management Engineering, IT Management
- Thesis on open banking, bank competition, and spillovers in mobile finance
- Advisor: Prof. Wonseok Oh
Ewha Womans University, B.A. in International Studies, B.S. in Software
- Minors in Business Administration and Statistics
- Magna cum laude, Dean's List
University of Marburg, Exchange Student, Germany
Teaching
Open Innovation, Teaching Assistant, for Prof. Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa, McCombs School of Business
UML and Java Programming, undergraduate textbook, co-author
- Contributed chapters on class design and object-oriented modeling.
Industry Experience
Meritz Fire & Marine Insurance, Data Scientist and Generative AI Engineer
- Built and operated LLM systems for underwriting and decision support, designed so an automated judgment can be traced back to the evidence behind it, and owned the data pipelines and analytics around them.
Fin&Pin, Co-Founder and CTO
- Led the technical work on explainable ESG ratings, including BERT-based rating and recommendation models.
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), AI Research Intern
- Built web-scraping pipelines and GAN-based models for painting-forgery detection.
SAP, IT Consulting Intern, Walldorf, Germany
- Test automation for SAP Cloud Platform with engineering teams across EMEA, the United States, and APAC.
Honors and Awards
- Merit Scholarship
- Software Scholarship and International Scholarship
- Women in Fintech Competition, Top 3 Finalist
- Government Venture Program Award
Contact
deborah.lee@utexas.edu
McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin