Welcome to our course on FinTech Foundations and Overview We're going to talk about the FinTech market issues, challenges, perspectives, and implications I'll give you an idea of where we're heading In our first module we're going to have some videos on what is FinTech Defining the market, helping you understand it from different perspectives because this is not even an easy issue to define You could look on Wikipedia but I would argue that that's an inadequate definition because there are different definitions depending on your perspective We'll talk about that in a minute We'll come back to what's going to be covered in our first module or set of videos Then we're going to talk about the FinTech business the business opportunities, the business applications How would you look at the market or the Fin of FinTech the finance markets, implications, applications and opportunities Third, we're going to look at the tech of FinTech What are the underlying technology? What's enabling this? What's driving this? What's behind a FinTech revolution or evolution depending on your perspective Finally, what are the implications for established firms Why established firms? Well, the implications for startups are relatively easy to see in the terms of many of the applications new businesses, new ideas So, we kind of talked about what's going on in FinTech from an entrepreneurial perspective But what do you do about all of this if you're a large established financial service firm And what are the implications for you, if you are startup when established firms start reacting more strongly So, that's the overview of where we're going in this course This is the first course, in a series or at least one course in a series of specialization on FinTech Will have other courses in the series as well but let's focus on this course now And let's look at our first module and what we're going to be talking about In our first module we're going to look at what is FinTech And we're going to define FinTech and describe FinTech but from different perspectives You can think of how you view FinTech as being biased or colored depending on your background your perspective, where you're coming from In essence, you could think of this like Graham Allison did when he wrote a book called The Essence of Decision to describe the 1962 Cuban missile crisis that President Kennedy faced with missiles in Cuba being a threat to the United States funded by Russia and how does the US react And the intriguing thing about this is John F. Kennedy described later that the essence of the ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the user or observer often indeed to the decision maker himself And in describing what happened Graham Allison wrote a book saying you could look at this from very different perspectives and see the exact same facts and interpret what happened of the same facts, very differently You could look at a political perspective you could look at a global economic perspective you could look at a military perspective, and come up with very different explanations of what was going on because your starting point and your assumptions of the decision, are quite different This became a founding idea of the Kennedy School of Management or excuse me Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University To think about different issues different policies, from different perspectives And that's useful often when we're dealing with something complex and hard to understand, and that's FinTech So, we're going to look at this from four different perspectives and defining what is FinTech We're going to look at FinTech from the perspective of large traditional financial firms And we'll have an interview with someone with 30 years experience in the industry both in working in the industry and as a professor And saying FinTech is not new, there's nothing new She describes this as FinTech for dinosaurs And you might think of dinosaurs as powerful large, challenging entities And that's like large financial service firms You might also if you're an entrepreneur think of them as things that are ready to be obsoleted And to be extinct Both perspectives have some merit and some value but they're are very different in their views You're giants, and you're going to dominate the earth or you're ready for extinction and the small startups are going to take over the earth Now then we'll move from the perspective of the industry finance established firms, to a perspective of a startup And for that, we'll have the CEO of a FinTech startup that will participate in a discussion of why is FinTech new and why is it a big business opportunity and what are some of the challenges and opportunities of FinTech and how would you define FinTech if you're a startup, if you're an entrepreneur If you're seeing this as huge opportunities Why is this all new, and a revolution We'll then move to a different perspective and that is, one of consumers What does FinTech mean to you? Not to you as a banker Not to you as a startup but to you as a consumer particularly a millennial consumer, or a young consumer What does FinTech mean to those who are so excited about new apps new ideas, new products, new opportunities It doesn't have to be young people it could be young at heart I still think of myself as a consumer as well as a professor and having perspectives of both the startup, and the industry But speaking of a consumer perspective and giving you some ideas on that And finally, what does it mean to investors? Why is this just a very fun rollercoaster of an opportunity and what are investors looking for in these FinTech markets? Why are they so excited? And what are they excited about? It's interesting too by the way that FinTech is a very broad area There are many areas of FinTech and we'll talk about many applications of FinTech But when you talk to investors it's hard to get them off of bitcoin or hard to get them off of cryptocurrency The degree of enthusiasm from the investor side is extraordinarily high, for something which is exploding in value And so we'll talk about that, and cryptocurrencies But there's more to it than just cryptocurrencies and investors are seeing many opportunities So these are just different lenses or perspectives different angles on FinTech different viewpoints on FinTech So, that gives you an idea of where we're heading And we look forward to having you in our first module, what is FinTech
