MIT management school launches Fintech Ventures as full-time semester course

MIT Sloan School of Management has launched Fintech Ventures as a full-semester course for Fall 2016 semester that will feature lectures by entrepreneurs and investors from fintech industry.

According to the official release, the Fintech Ventures is a project and lecture based course exploring different sub-industries within fintech sector including cryptocurrencies, payments, trading, among others.

"FinTech Ventures combines technical knowledge with practical implementation of ideas. We have found that an interdisciplinary approach creates great motivation for students to dive deeply into the material and explore the industry from a number of different perspectives such as understanding business models, industry dynamics, the incentives of all the players in the industry, and regulatory structure,” Prof. Antoinette Schoar, co-teaching the course said.

Enrolled students of this course will be asked to develop business plans for their own fintech ideas in teams. The teams will be eligible to compete in a new MIT FinTech Competition. The course will be taught by Visiting Associate Professor Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, the Michael M. Koerner (1949) professor of entrepreneurship and a professor of finance at MIT Sloan.

The school first launched the FinTech Ventures course last year as a half-semester course. The student teams comprised of business, engineering, computer science, and law students and worked together to propose a business plan throughout the remainder of the semester.

MIT Sloan was the first management school in United States to launch graduate-level course covering fintech applications. This course has been initiated by Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and the Finance Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, in collaboration with the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Harvard Law School.

The school has also launched a new course on Healthcare Finance for the Fall 2016 semester that will cover the role of finance in healthcare industry.