FinTech isn't a Course Anymore: It's Just Finance

After a decade teaching and watching FinTech transform from buzzword to bedrock, I've reached an uncomfortable conclusion:

Our approach in weaving technology into Master of Finance degree programs is outdated.

We still offer "FinTech" as a standalone course, as if it were an exotic elective rather than the operating system of modern finance. That might have been ok in 2016...

My post is not a criticism of colleagues who pioneered these courses, they were essential bridges. In fact, I was (or rather still am) one of them. But now, in 2025, teaching FinTech separately from core finance courses feels wrong. The distinction between a finance topic and the technology supporting it no longer exists in practice and the depth required in "Fin" and "Tech" cannot possibly be imparted in a single elective.

Now nothing is FinTech, and everything is FinTech in finance.

Another approach that also seems to go down a wrong path is to teach finance and technology courses separately. It almost compounds the problem. Machine learning gets one course, blockchain another, each taught in isolation from the financial concepts they already have fundamentally transformed. The good news is that leading scholars are pushing the boundaries: Bryan Kelly at Yale applies AI to asset pricing. Andreas Park and Katya Malinova hypothesise how automated market makers (AMMs) could change equity markets.

The issue to be addressed here is: Fragmentation!

Students will have to be able to use technology in the respective financial services setting.

Some ideas for integration: 1) Laura Veldkamp 's work on the data feedback loop offers a novel way to value data-intense companies like Amazon. So understanding her work belongs to a valuation course alongside more traditional concepts like discounted cash flow (DCF) and comparables. 2) Christian Catalini's insights document how blockchain protocols reshape global payments today where stablecoin volume is in the billions of dollars already according to a recent post by Visa. Hence, including stablecoins in lectures on payments that traditionally only covered SWIFT seems essential. 3) Last, tokenisation (also see Lambert et al., 2021) is the evolution of capital raising itself rather than part of a standalone Blockchain course and therefore should be included in a Corporate Finance class. Again, the path forward is accepting that FinTech has dissolved into finance itself.

For executives who are hiring graduates, lack of depth and fragmentation both create real costs. New analysts learned FinTech as garnish rather than ingredient, potentially unable to recognise when one technology might solve a financial problem or how another could restructure a market. They either know the synthesis at a high level only or the pieces thoroughly without relevant context.

I understand the challenge this poses for finance faculty. Not everyone who brilliantly teaches option pricing theory can immediately explain how smart contracts automate that same theory on-chain... (albeit there's somewhat related work on that, too). But this is the wake-up call:

Traditional finance faculty need to engage with technology more to understand how it impacts the separate disciplines of finance.

Where individual faculty up-skilling is not feasible instantly, perhaps collaboration offers a practical path. Partnerships between finance professors and computer science or engineering faculty may do the trick. Such teams can teach courses where theoretical depth in financial economics meets understanding around application and implementation of technologies. Students would benefit from seeing finance and technology integrated and at a detailed level, which is what they will encounter in their workplace after graduation.

Hopefully we can stop offering both, a) standalone FinTech courses and b) separate finance and technology courses respectively, soon. I know we need time to adapt. I will need time to prepare, too. I will teach a FinTech course this academic year. But I will surely also work on preparing two new courses where financial theory meets technology practice…