MBA Programs Evolve to Meet The Fintech Challenge

The increasing usage of digital assets such as cryptocurrencies, crypto-commodities, crypto-tokens and trends such as peer-to-peer lending, smart insurance, and algorithmic financial planning is leading the way for business model innovation. For the MBA students and business schools, such a situation calls for bringing in innovative changes in the curriculum to meet the new age challenges.    

Arjun Devgan, pursuing the One-Year MBA program at Cornell SC Johnson Graduate School of Management (class of 2018) writing in the School blog says the One-Year and Two-Year MBA students a golden opportunity to be well-positioned to take advantage of this paradigm shift. The MBA students studying in Ithaca will be able to spend a full or half semester at Cornell’s brand-new Tech campus located in New York City.

To equip students to solve business problems in this age of digital transformation, Johnson offers two intensives at Cornell Tech: the digital marketing intensive and the fintech intensive.

“While making career decisions, I believe that it’s imperative to have a five- to seven-year plan. With my background in payments and remittances, the fintech intensive program offered me a launch pad to dive deep into the world of financial technology,” says Arjun.

The location of the Cornell Tech campus in New York City gives easy access to the financial services industry and a booming tech scene. There is a sizable presence of the Cornell community which helps create a connection with a prospective employer.

“Classes such as the Fintech Practicum, Business Models, Cryptocurrencies, and a Field Project with one of Citi Ventures’ portfolio companies offer a great combination of basic theoretical concepts and real-world experiential learning. This rigorous coursework is a gamut of crash courses in cryptography, pricing strategies that maximize customer lifetime value, and frameworks to evaluate fintech activity,” he adds.

Arjun says collaborating with students in the Johnson Cornell Tech MBA program and other Masters’ of Science students gave him a first-hand experience of the challenges entrepreneurs go through when launching a new business. “We worked together to build a business model and go-to-market plan around their startup idea as part of Cornell Tech’s Startup Studio curriculum,” he adds.

While applying for the fintech intensive, he did not realise that there would be a lot of students with a significant background in payments or banking. The Fintech Practicum speaker series became even more enriching as it was a dialogue between the students and the speaker rather than just a monologue, he says.

“Even though this is the year of inception for the intensives, I can vouch for the breadth and depth of the learning that we went through. It’s said that “change is the only constant.” The program might evolve over time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the changes are minimal because even in its present state, the content is high quality and the program is well structured,” he adds.

Cornell Tech also has a state-of-the-art, on-campus housing. It’s literally called The House at Cornell Tech, and the solar-panel clad building is one of the most energy-efficient buildings in the world, with reduced CO2 emissions equivalent to planting 5,300 new trees each year, Arjun says.

The location of the Cornell Tech campus in New York City gives easy access to the financial services industry and a booming tech scene. There is a sizable presence of the Cornell community which helps create a connection with a prospective employer.

Moreover, NYC also hosts a lot of fintech meetups. The blockchain and crypto-market are in their infancy and attending fintech meetup groups, with expert panellists from innovative startups and senior professionals from the financial services industry, is a great way to keep up with new use cases and solutions, he says.

“One concern I had while moving to New York City was my opportunity cost of not being in Ithaca. There were some interesting courses offered at our home campus, such as Building a Consumer Internet Business, Designing Data Products, Professor Robert Frank’s Rivalry and Cooperation, and more. But the timetable is structured well, and I was able to take all the courses I was interested in by travelling to Ithaca on the weekends,” he adds.

Arjun and several other students who spent the semester at the Tech Campus were given financial assistance for additional living expenses incurred in New York City through the Johnson Annual Fund and a generous gift from Professor Richard Schneider ’70.

Arjun had worked for six years with the Tata Group, in their ATM managed services and global B2B telecom businesses across business analytics (payments), corporate strategy (telecom), and product management (fintech) functions.

The highlights of his MBA experience include working with cross-functional and cross-geographical teams on real-world projects such as the IoT go-to-market project with Intel and a city ranking index project with Citi Ventures. He was also part of BR Ventures, a VC fund that invests in tech startups. At Cornell Tech, he took new-age courses such as cryptocurrencies, big data, and design thinking.