FINN43715: Advanced Financial Technologies

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• Advanced Financial Technologies takes examples and case studies from the nascent financial innovation landscape and is focused on how financial technologies are built and implemented in practice.
• This is designed to be a hands-on course in FinTech that takes a diverse set of contemporary topics and areas to teach practical skills related to financial technologies and infrastructures.
• The aim of this course is to conduct a deep dive into selected financial technologies and their design, including Decentralized Finance, markets and broader financial infrastructure.
• Students will finish the course with a technical and practical understanding of financial technologies and will be able to analyse data from and implement simple designs of financial market infrastructure using programming languages such as Python or Solidity.
• Students do not require any specific programming experience. This course will be self-contained in this respect and does not assume any prior knowledge.

• Financial Technologies is a diverse, contemporary and evolving area for research and innovation. Therefore, specific lecture content will be updated with respect to current trends and the expertise of the module team. The following is an indicative list of potential topics:
• Financial Cryptography & Distributed Ledger Technologies;
• Electronic Ledgers & Payment Systems (Application programming interfaces, ZCASH technologies, Central Bank Digital Currencies);
• Smart Contracts in Finance;
• Tokenisation (e.g., non-fungible tokens, initial coin offerings, stablecoins);
• Decentralized Exchanges & Lending Protocols;
• Price Oracles.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• By the end of the module students should be able to:
• Identify core components of the new financial technologies and know how to implement them in practice.
• Be able to sketch the design framework for new types of financial instruments and intermediation protocols.
• Understand the role of cryptographic methods and analytics in financial services and be able to apply them.
• Understand the underlying technical solutions to assess the risk of new financial products and infrastructures.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Modify and deploy smart contract code (Solidity) to blockchains;
• Design, price and use decentralized financial product offerings;
• Collect and analyse on-chain data to answer specific research questions and compare product offerings.

Key Skills:

• Financial modelling.
• Group work.
• Product design.

• Blended teaching model, with some in person lectures, video-based discussions and presentations.
• Synchronous class blended in person and virtual classrooms with group discussions and presentations.
• Workshop teaching in person or online with potentially asynchronous delivery.
• Flipped classroom using the prepared materials to deliver summaries of financial technology designs and their implementation.

Coding assignments for the implementation of financial technologies designs in preparation for classes. Oral feedback and group discussions in a flipped classroom environment.

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