This course is designed to explore the new financial technology or “FinTech” models that are driving an unprecedented transformation of finance around the world. Traditional finance is being reshaped in part by tech giants (e.g., social media, e-commerce, and telecommunications) who provide streamlined financial services to their own existing customer bases. There also are entirely new technologies that bring democratization, inclusion and disruption to traditional finance.

These transformations create both challenges and opportunities, building synergies with new business and regulatory models. In this course we identify the fundamentals and help make sense of this wave of change as it happens. We explore the main areas of financial services being disrupted by the new financial technologies including payments, insurance, deposits and lending, capital raising, investment management and market provisioning. We address the core technologies driving FinTech (such as Cloud Services, AI, Big Data, cryptocurrencies and Blockchain) and identify resulting new business models and their regulation. This will set the stage for understanding the FinTech ecosystem and grappling with the potential direction of future change.