Why we need FinTech
The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Staying on the Cutting Edge of FinTech
The fourth industrial revolution is shaping a future that will fundamentally change how we live, work, and engage. Driven by digital technologies and enabled by access to data and tools for its analyses on an unprecedented scale, this age will radically change every aspect of business. In particular, digital technologies like blockchain, artificial intelligence, and identity management will create new business models and disrupt existing ways of delivering banking and financial services.
Preparing graduates for the fourth industrial revolution will require us to provide our students with tools to stay at the cutting edge of FinTech and its impact on the evolving financial services industry.
The NIU College of Business aspires to stay at the cutting edge of the tech revolution by creating a platform —The FinTech Lab — for student learning that will prepare them to be ready and competitive for this new future.
Creating a FinTech Lab will support an applied, experiential environment where students, faculty and corporate partners can experiment with technologies transforming financial services, insurance and real estate.
The gold standard for financial market news, data, and trading tools is the Bloomberg Terminal. This software system — designed specifically for trading desks and financial market participants — provides users with real-time coverage of equities, fixed income securities, derivatives, swaps and foreign currencies and features API connectivity which allows programmers to connect with applications using Python, Java, R, Excel, etc. There are currently over 300,000 Bloomberg Terminal subscriptions worldwide.
The price of this financial powerhouse is significant at over $24,000 per year. As a result, the College of Business offers roughly 300 finance students only one terminal. In any given semester 80-100 students and faculty members are vying for time on the terminal to complete class assignments, research projects, and professional certifications. The terminal is used almost 24 hours a day, 7 days a week during the academic year and even over breaks.
This fund would support a lab that would feature seven Bloomberg terminals along the room’s perimeter, each with four flat screen LCD monitors. A mobile Bloomberg laptop will broaden terminal usage beyond the lab confines. An additional 21 PCs/laptops would be positioned in trading station clusters around the room. In order to minimize distraction and enable focus when computer usage is not required, the monitors will have the ability to be recessed.
For NIU and the College of Business to remain vibrant and deliver a world class learning experience, it is critical that we invest in initiatives with a keen eye to the future and learn to adapt. In the words of Charles Darwin, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
Thank you for supporting a world class FinTech Lab in the NIU College of Business.
