Saïd Announces Online FinTech Course

FinTech is a topic of the moment at leading business schools, and Oxford University’s Saïd Business School is joining in with a new online course. The course, created in partnership with online education company GetSmarter, will start in October and continue for ten weeks.

In announcing the course, Saïd stressed the potential for new technologies to lead to paradigm shifts in finance. The school said millions of jobs could be lost over the next ten years as a result of new financial technologies.

To give an overview of changes that are in the works, Saïd’s course will cover a range of topics, including blockchain technology, applications of artificial intelligence in finance, crowdfunding and even quantum computing.

Saïd is the latest business school to give a nod to the growing importance of FinTech, but it’s hardly the only.

Last year, New York University’s Stern School of Business became the first business school to launch a FinTech MBA specialization. Then, months later, the school kicked off its first annual FinTech conference.

Other top business schools are taking note of rising student demand for FinTech courses, too.

For example, according to Reuters, University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and Columbia Business School have all debuted FinTech courses recently, and Stanford Graduate School of Business plans to add one this fall.

Student appetite is part of the reason for the rise of FinTech courses at top business schools. Many students are enthusiastic about the potential of FinTech, which has also led to the creation of student-run FinTech groups at several top schools – see Wharton FinTech, for example.

For these students, the disruptive possibilities of FinTech are especially intriguing. In April, Financial Times ran an article about the increasing popularity of FinTech on B-school campuses titled FinTech Lures MBAs Away From Banking and Consulting.

With these changes underway, maybe it’s no surprise that when they announced their new FinTech course, Saïd described FinTech as presenting “simultaneous threats and opportunities.”

But with the new course, Saïd appears to be taking an approach similar to that of several other top business schools: giving people knowledge to see the threats coming and take advantage of the opportunities.

Along these lines, the school said they intended the course to “provide entrepreneurs and executives with the insights and knowledge necessary to navigate this changing landscape, and adapt and progress in their careers.”

Saïd expects that the course will take students between seven and ten hours a week for ten weeks. For more information, see the course website.