Data and Technology in Finance
SFI Prof. Laurent Frésard, Professor of Finance, Università della Svizzera italiana
Roger Fehr, Head of Data Management & Analytics, Swisscom (Schweiz) AG
This Master Class will be held by videoconferencing from 13h00 to 16h00.
In a digitized world, the ability to understand new technologies and to link them to existing data is of crucial importance. In the last decade, the availability and variety of data has exploded, following fast improvements in digital technologies and computing power. The increased focus of the business community on data has fostered the development of new tools to generate, analyse, and extract value from large amount of data. Like many industries, the financial sector is currently experiencing a technological shake-out, as many players rush to assess how to optimize and use existing data in creative and profitable ways. An in-depth understanding of new data-related technologies and the new opportunities that they offer constitutes an essential success factor for financial actors and thus an indispensable prerequisite for professional development.
Current Situation and Objective
Financial institutions worldwide are spending billions of dollars to understand how to harness the power of data and rethink their technology strategies and operations accordingly. Current developments around data and analytics can however appear nebulous, daunting, and complex. Media outlets are flooded with buzzwords, ranging from “big data”, “digital transformation”, “artificial intelligence”, “algorithms”, “machine learning”, “data science”, “FinTech”, or the “zettabyte” economy. The recent outbreak of Covid-19 is also raising new questions about how financial institutions and their employees can lever new technologies to efficiently respond to the mounting crisis and innovate for the long run.
The Master Class “Data and Technology in Finance” proposes to pause, step back, and decrypt these buzzwords and trends through an intuitive and deliberately non-technical perspective. The aim is to provide a deeper understanding of current applications and development based on the combination of new data and technologies in the financial sector. The class discusses concrete examples from the practice, including for instance fraud detection, clients’ profiling, credit screening, or compliance. The class will have a special focus on the effects of the Covid outbreak on technology usages and risks.
Target Audience
The Master's class is aimed at professionals in the financial industry who wish to broaden their knowledge capital and deepen their understanding of new trends in financial technology (data and tools). The focus is on enabling participants to think critically about the future opportunities and challenges for their job, team, and organization.