Finance

This course is designed to help the student make well-informed judgments when faced with personal financial decisions. Such decisions are growing in number and complexity, and both individuals and families need a considerable degree of financial expertise in order to utilize optimally their limited incomes. Principal topics include: insurance (medical, life, automobile and disability), consumer credit, estate planning, taxation, personal investments (real estate, securities, etc.), social security legislation and personal financial planning.

This course provides a broad introduction to finance and financial logic, with emphasis on principles, applications and criteria used in decision-making.  Core topics to be covered include interest rates, time value of money, bond valuation, yield curves, stock valuation, and risk and return analysis.  The course is designed to help build students' financial literacy and provide a solid foundation for later courses in financial management, investments, and financial technology.

This course develops expertise in Finance, Technology, Innovation, leadership, and decision-making by focusing on real-world challenges in the field of FinTech. We will be actively discussing and learning how to analyze, identify, and manage/innovate FinTech across many functional disciplines including Financial, Insurance, Banking, Trading, Information Technology, Regulation, and Budgeting. Students are introduced to the Financial industry and the FinTech ecosystem. The course adopts a decision-maker and leadership perspective (business, operational, functional, and technical leadership) by emphasizing the relationships among financial data, their underlying economic events, risk profiles, challenges/opportunities, and the responses by all stakeholders in a business/corporation.

This course introduces students to the financial innovations and digital assets that are significantly transforming the banking and financial services sector. The course exposes students to strategic skills and analytical tools that prepare them to thrive in this digital age. The immersive experience will also include an understanding of the changing dynamics in the global banking and financial services sectors and how leveraging fintech and analytics can drive innovation and digital transformation. The course will also explore how digital currency innovations are increasingly altering basic financial intermediation functions such as payment processing, risk management, information dissemination, price discovery, capital raising, consumer expectations concerning access to funds, and the timing of loan decisions. Students will also spend time exploring the emerging challenges presented by the FinTech revolution, including traditional and emergent competitors as well as demographic, social, ethical, and technological forces facing the industry. Students will have hands-on problem-solving experiences that can be useful in FinTech applications and innovation. Students will demonstrate their knowledge through exercises, exams, and a final project that explores the raising of financing through the decentralized finance ecosystem.

This course provides the foundation for financial data analytics used in business and FinTech applications. The objective of this course is for students to gain experience in analyzing financial data using modern machine learning techniques, statistical methods, and prediction models. Students will develop computational skills to perform data analysis using a modern statistical programming environment and apply these skills to address a range of problems encountered by business firms, including those in the FinTech industry. The topics discussed include an introduction to R language, visualization of financial data, cluster analysis, simple and multiple linear regression, classification models, high dimension data analysis using Lasso, and model assessment and selection using cross validation. Students will have hands-on experience in the development of data analytics applications to analyze real world financial problems.