Introduction to FinTech, Finnovation and Finalytics

Catalog description

The goal of the course is to give a systematic and rigorous introduction to the emerging areas of financial technology, digital economy, and applications of big data, machine learning, and AI in business economics. This EMBA Elective is comprised of 5 intensive sessions (detailed in course outline) of lectures, discussions, guest lectures, and readings.A confluence of events and trends have provided the opportunity for technological disruption of the financial services, investments, and other business-related fields as never seen before. With an estimated $90BN of annual financial services profitability at risk by 2020, there is a genuine demand for peer-to-peer interactions and functional trust systems. Customers, particularly millennials, are eagerly embracing startups over traditional financial services providers. Venture Capitalists are also providing easy money. Top employment talent is willing to forgo Wall St compensation for Fintech optionality. Yet financial institutions have been slow to embrace new product offerings and the digital economy (focusing on post-crisis balance sheet strength vs. customer needs, innovation, growth) and regulators are often left in quagmires due to the novelty and fast-evolving nature of the technologies and business models involved.Against such a backdrop, the course aims to provide a concise but insightful overview of technologies such as distributed ledgers or artificial intelligence, so that students without the technical background can still obtain a working knowledge of the fields when examining their applications in finance and business-related fields. Students will also analyze financial innovations in payments, lending, and crowdfunding, etc., to deepen their understanding of the economics of fintech and big data, as well as the use of analytics brought forth by advances in machine learning and data science.Our focus is…