The new qualifications for crypto and fintech jobs
If you want to get into banking now, it might not make sense to study economics, or even straight banking and finance. A new type of qualification is emerging to provide talent for the latest generation of finance firms.
The University of Southampton in the UK, for example, has changed its Bachelor of Finance degree to a “Bachelor of Finance and Financial Technology”, covering crypto, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending and technology. Larisa Yarovaya, who runs the new course in Southampton, says it has been several years in the making and would have happened faster without COVID. “The course is designed to provide students with more fundamental knowledge of issues such as blockchain and the synergies between finance and technology,” says Yarovaya. “Today, teaching only traditional finance can limit our students’ career opportunities. We wanted to integrate these cutting-edge technologies into a course that is as innovative as possible.”
Although crypto has gone through another winter, its proponents are as upbeat as ever, and the blockchain technology that underpins crypto is still being touted as the next big payment system. Following its recent fintech conference, Deutsche Bank says that payments systems are still expected to deliver “solid growth” relative to other technology sectors in any downturn, and that the conversation is now about things like real-time payments, payment speed, software and embedded payments and distributed ledger electronic monetization (blockchain) technology.
Southampton is not the only university to launch a focused fintech degree. In the US, the New Jersey Institute of Technology has launched a new bachelor’s degree in fintech, which covers crypto, blockchain and artificial intelligence. The UK’s University of Sussex has a new finance and technology degree starting next year, and the University of Reading’s ICMA center launched a new BSc in finance with a focus on fintech in 2021.
It’s still early days. At Southampton, Yarovaya will not reveal how many have signed up for the course this year, but says that ultimately it is likely to be “several dozen” in the future. Students who learn about fintech will become more employable, she says: “They will have the opportunity to work in any sector or to create their own business.”
What Southampton’s new course doesn’t do is teach students how to code. Although students will learn the basics of computer programming along with MatLab and AI, Yarovaya says coding is not the focus — or at least not yet. “We want to see how complex we can make the course before adding programming modules,” she says.
Photo by Trevor Black on Unsplash
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