Foundations of Fintech

Catalog description

“FinTech” refers to financial sector innovations involving technology-enabled business models that can facilitate disintermediation, revolutionize how existing firms create and deliver products and services, address privacy, regulatory and law-enforcement challenges, provide new gateways for entrepreneurship, and seed opportunities for inclusive growth. FinTech is also the label for increasingly technological approaches to the main financial intermediation functions: payments, capital raising, remittances, managing uncertainty and risk, market price discovery, and mediating information asymmetry and incentives. In today’s FinTech businesses, consumers bank via mobile apps integrated into social media, institutions trade electronically, and robo-advisers make decisions about investment portfolios. This inter-departmental course provides an introduction to the emerging FinTech discipline. It is intended to be the starting point for Stern students who may take additional electives in the FinTech area, while also providing an overview of the area for students who intend to take only one FinTech course. The course will study: • How is financial innovation different than industrial innovation? How is financial innovation evolving? What are the light sides and dark sides of financial innovation? • Will traditional financial intermediaries be able to adapt? Or will upstart FinTechs disrupt them, re-imagining business models just as Amazon reshaped book-selling and Uber transformed taxi-rides? • What are the critical technology strategies and foundational technologies in FinTech? • What are the core and novel sources of FinTech data, how are they managed? How is data visualization evolving? • What are the primary FinTech data science methods and tools? How do they apply to real FinTech problems and questions today? • How is FinTech reconfiguring financial services business…