FinTech
Banks and other financial institutions are central entities that are crucial to the way capital markets are organized today. They have a variety of tasks: They lend to business and retail customers, thereby creating money, accept deposits, transfer money, advise customers, help companies issue stock, and much more. While all of these services are important for the smooth allocation of capital in an economy, recent technological advances allow companies called FinTechs to challenge banks' traditional business models. While FinTechs are still centralized entities, decentralized innovations based on blockchain technologies have the potential to fundamentally upend the system.
We start with a discussion of the problems with capital allocation and what financial institutions are doing to address these problems. The key question we are interested in is how efficient alternative solutions offered by traditional banks, FinTechs and Decentralized Finance applications are compared to each other. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the new technologies and how likely are they to prevail? In the different parts of the course, we will explore specific examples, including the status quo and possible ways forward.
FinTech in the Winter Semester 2024/2025:
The course will take place as a block course in the Winter semester 2024/2025, in the second half of the semester, with three meetings per week. We will start in the week before Christmas, on December 17th. The last session will take place on February 13th, during the final week of the semester. We will meet every Wednesday at 9:45, Wednesday at 11:30, and Thursday at 9:45, all in Room 217 in Building 20.21 on Campus South.