NYU’s Stern School of Business announced on June 22, 2016 that it has developed a special FinTech specialization for MBAs interested in leveraging technology to disrupt the finance and investment spaces.
“Technology continues to transform the business landscape at a breathtaking pace,” noted Raghu Sundaram, Vice Dean of MBA Programs and Online Learning. “Business education needs to innovate to keep pace with the rapid rate of change. The launching of the FinTech specialization, a joint creation of our Finance and Information, Operations and Management Sciences (IOMS) departments, is an important step in this direction.”
If you are seeking to differentiate yourself from the 100,000+ MBA degrees awarded annually in the United States (source: GMAC), you may wish to consider a concentration like this one.
NYU defines FinTech as follows:
“FinTech covers technology-enabled business model innovation in the financial sector. Such innovation can disrupt existing industry structures and blur industry boundaries, facilitate strategic disintermediation, revolutionize how firms create and deliver products and services, create significant privacy, regulatory and law-enforcement challenges, provide new gateways for entrepreneurship, and seed opportunities for inclusive growth. Examples of innovations that are central to FinTech include cryptocurrencies and the blockchain, digital advisory and trading systems, artificial intelligence and machine learning, peer-to-peer lending, equity crowdfunding and mobile payment systems.”
Specific examples of disruptive FinTech companies and products include BitCoin, peer-to-peer lending companies like SoFi (recently valued at over $4B) and Lending Club, and Stockholm-based “biohacking” credit card chip company Calm Body Modification, Inc.
Sample courses represented in the Stern MBA FinTech specialization focus on some of the hottest current issues in Silicon Valley, like credit modeling, Blockchain, and financial information security.
“The emergence of FinTech demonstrates how powerful the intersection of disciplines can be to drive innovation,” says Peter Henry, Dean of NYU Stern. “This collaboration of thought leadership among [NYU Stern] faculty gave rise to our new specialization, and the approach can empower all of our students in their pursuits to solve problems and create value in any sector.”
According to the Citi GPS March report on Digital Disruption: “Investments in financial technology have growth exponentially in the past decade — rising from $1.8 billion in 2010 to $19 billion in 2015 — with over 70% of this investment focusing on the “last mile” of user experience in the consumer space.”
If you are seeking to take advantage of the tremendous rise in investment and innovation in the FinTech space, and make a pivot from an engineering or finance background into the FinTech world, NYU Stern’s new specialization may give you just the strategic advantage you need.
If you would like guidance on how to best position yourself for a transition into FinTech, or are seeking to use your time at business school to make a pivot into a new professional area, please feel free to reach out and introduce yourself to the team at Info@TranscendAdmissions.com.
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Read the full NYU Stern Press Release here.