Hello, My name is Elven Riley and this talk is on Disruptive Finance.What pedagogical decisions shape teaching technology to millennial undergraduate financemajors?

First, permit me a brief introduction to set-up the topic. We will then scope the topicalareas, followed by an overview of the course and observations.

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My personal history is in math and computer science and many years working on the SellSide of Wall St.I was attracted to the financial industry because of my personal skills as “an agent ofchange”.I have not been disappointed with the choice of industry application.Finance is about enabling change, profiting from change, and protecting gains fromprobable change.

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How does a real-time Virtual Reality clip from a farmer in India get delivered with crop-futures prices to my smart phone?The U.S. technology infrastructure is behind others, thus masking the pervasiveness ofglobal technology change

This handicaps faculty and students comprehension of technology.We know corporate owned data already shows as an asset on the balance sheet.Corporate equity and credit analysis now includes internal Internet-of-Things (IOT)adoption rate assessments.And cybersecurity issues are discussed in every board room.

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The life-cycle of a course in Higher Ed must be more responsive to the changes in theFinancial Industry.Smoke-stack automation is re-engineering brokers and traders functions into bots, globally.First-to-Market product delivery has become First-to-Tweet a found solution, classiccompetitive advantages have evaporated.

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Toffler’s 3rd Wave was a passive observation of change.This new fourth wave is about active and aggressive participation in change.Get involved or be trampled.Today, change is pushed before the Outcomes or the Risk, are detailed or priced.Change has now transformed into the Disruption of People, Products, and Process.

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The homogeneity of accepted finance pedagogy grew from the consistency imposed bynation-states in their regional financial markets.All is in Flux today.What we teach about the 2008 Great Recession is a history class about markets that nolonger exist.Useful, but not sufficient without the technology context of at least Low Latency and HighFrequency Trading; dare I include RegTech?We stumbled into building this course in 2013; and we will spare you the drunkards walkthat led to today.We humbly share our experience and findings.The education problem we discovered is one of scoping.How to scope the FinTech body-of-knowledge into a class– when the past is huge, the future unknown, and the present is chaos.

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I am not calling to replace the existing finance curriculum.I am saying that much like the 2 dimensional Flatland inhabitants, our curriculum is movingto 3 dimensions.And for now, FinTech is the noun used to identify the 3rd dimension.Our ability to educate Finance now requires inclusion of FinTech.(Now let’s frame the topics for our undergraduate course in the ‘Technology of Finance’)

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The sun comes up, the markets open, and teams of people interact to exchange risk for afee.This will continue and the nimble will exploit any opportunity discovered.We found our students had weak operational knowledge of even generic Financial Servicesbusiness models and no technology infrastructure.We chose Retail Banking, Brokerage, and Exchanges to anchor the industry concepts.Simple infrastructure line diagrams and terminology are presented as if the students werethe new mid-level business manager assigned to manage this line-of-business.

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Programming with innovation yields Return On Investment not just Process automation.Data is a corporate asset to be grown, not just a by-product to be mined.Time is bound to the data and process inextricably.The three, Process + Data + Time, define the foundational concepts of object technologiesin the 1970s and provide our taxonomy for introducing subsequent technology concepts.Hardware and electronics is beyond our scope aside from costs related to Power,Connectivity, Cooling, and Disaster Recovery.

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Interestingly, Objects that can learn a behavior, heuristics, machine learning.The object can also share a context or state-fullness with other objects.Today, objects are used to deliver responses to your living room Alexa.Machine Learning and Objects are used to actualize on business change rapidly.The rude reality, is that for the Financial Industry every business process change is also achange to technology.Success requires changing both simultaneously.Business constraints become reality, when no technology solution may be found at anyacceptable price or time frame.We discuss business disintermediation occurring, when a new competitor thinks out-of-the-box, to deliver a technology enabled alternative business solution.

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I recently held up a slide rule in my FinTech class comprised of all Seniors.None could name it, nor when told what it was, what it might be used for.Also recently, I made a comment about Hadoop in a Business School faculty meeting andthe response was amused laughter with the novelty of the term.Both the faculty and the ‘digital native’ student in a business school appear to have littletechnology terminology, old or new.For each of the three object-categories, we include some technology history avoidingarcane terms except for humor.

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The integration of knowledge that is required to explain what is inside today’s smart mobilephone, reflects the masterful integration of many areas of expertise.There are at least three different antenna technologies and several rare earth minerals inthe functional electrical engineering required to make the phone work with my touch.We attempt to include the most basic multi-discipline Arts & Science concepts inPsychology, Biology, Math, Engineering.These are connected to business school program concepts in Management, Supply Chain,and Entrepreneurial Studies.We found the 1950 book, The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Weiner, helpful inguiding the topics chosen about People and Things.

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Today the human experience is infused with technology; and humanity is committed to thecontinuous integration of these tools.The human team, infused with technology, is today’s standard unit.Teams are linked in real-time across-time-zone with video, sound, and information.Sometimes with trained electronic assistants.Human excellence in the NEW SMART MACHINE AGE is challenging our concept ofassessment and performance.To encourage team experience, we flip the classroom occasionally.The concept-to-practice experiments are impactful, but we find students are unable towork or learn as a team without active professor facilitation.

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The individual contributor can compete with another human but will lose to a bot trainedby 10 years of human history and the ability to respond in Nano-seconds.The augmented team wins today; and will continue to win.After all, today’s IBM Watson is, in reality, an augmented team marketed as a bot. A bot ofno use without a human team.We find a significant percentage of students are afraid of their technology future, much likeLuddites were.We believe this to be common in Financial Services and we include a few historicaltechnology disruptions with the learning objective of how to thrive in the chaos.

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So, What is our experience shaping a specific course into this space? Mixed but positive.The course can be housed in a traditional degree program using today’s common LMS anddelivery formats.Assessment ,mapped to Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Domains, shows (Remembering,Understanding, Applying) are achievable in one semester, while the remaining (Analyzing,Evaluating, Creating) remain a challenge for a single course.

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These 6 themes are sequentially delivered in one semester, and unit tested for basiccomprehension.1&2 The first two, position the student as a corporate mid-level business manager andprovide basic vocabulary to communicate with both tech and business employees.3 The disruptive technologies are current, and easily lead to active classroom discussionsbut require significant prep.4 The object paradigm is used to connect the historical development of informationtechnologies to today’s disruptive headlines.5 We then return to a business context and highlight formal methodologies for managingchange.6 We close with ownership & ethics when control is shared and systems are fragile.

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Bloom’s Learning Domain: ‘Applying’, is achieved by 4 or 5 in-class exercises from this list.A related lecture is pre-recorded and assigned as homework in preparation for the exercise.Several of our exercises have flopped miserably and were removed from this list.

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The course design has remained stable and the scope has remained broad.The annual course prep has been about twice the effort of a more traditional financeelective course.Many students comment that the course was good, but a significantly different experience.Alumni, having taken this course, comment that they did not really “get it” until their jobpresented the actual event.

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Conclusions:• To defend the Finance Concentration as having value requires the addition of technology

literacy beyond spread sheets.• A single course can not address technology literacy, it is a Band-Aid.• Generation-Y requires interaction and experimentation to achieve the first 3 Bloom’s

taxonomy learning goals.• Assessment has the dual function of grade formation, and encouraging self-evaluation of

technology literacy later in life.

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Please provide questions though I may not be able to answer them…Your feedback and thoughts are of great value.Thank You for your interest and your time.

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