Digital playground for Foundations of Fintech

Felix Fattinger will showcase how support from the Williams Centre for Learning Advancement has enabled BMMLAB to develop state-of-the-art technologies to deliver our new Foundations of Fintech subject.

Felix Fattinger

Technology is currently transforming the financial industry with the potential to disrupt traditional structures and practices. However, this is by no means a recent phenomenon, but rather has occurred repeatedly throughout human history. Our new subject “Foundations of Fintech” aims at exploring the current opportunities and risks arising from the inevitable technological advancements. The subject is organised around a number of fundamental economic problems. We discuss how these problems have been solved historically, how technology could provide transformative solutions moving forward, and where the limitations and regulatory challenges of these new technologies lie.

The support from the WCLA-funded project “Digital Playground for Foundations of Fintech” has been of fundamental importance in building the infrastructure that underlies our subject. In this talk, I will showcase how we make use of state-of-the-art applications to build a wholistic classroom infrastructure that enables hands-on interactive learning. Our setup equips more than 300 (largely inexperienced) students to directly interact with the technologies introduced in class. For example, our students access and contribute to a customized Ethereum blockchain, use basic machine learning techniques to correlate media headlines with stock returns, and develop their own default prediction model using real-world commercial loan data.

The presentation is at 12pm, Tuesday 17 September.  More information can be found here.

More Information

Elizabeth Bowman

bmm-lab@unimelb.edu.au