How Software Ate Finance

Software is eating the world, with radical consequences for financial services. This course will give you a foundation for understanding the future of financial services, and guide you in creating fintech businesses in the 2020s and beyond. The course has three objectives. First, we study the transformation of financial services through software, surveying payments, deposits and credit cards, securities and derivatives, capital markets, digital assets (including cryptocurrencies and blockchain mechanisms), financing and lending, wealth and asset management, and regulation and compliance. Second, we invite leading innovators to address how software has shaped their experiences; identify fundamental drivers; and forecast trends, challenges, and opportunities. Third, we present a roadmap for the evolution of the financial system, where traditional dichotomies -- trader / engineer, buy side / sell side, regulated / non-regulated, infrastructure provider / infrastructure user, data provider / data consumer -- give way to an ecosystem organized around producers and consumers of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the rise of platforms and financial cloud providers, and the transformation of Wall Street economics into software economics. The lecturer is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, executive, investor, and risk manager. As a Stanford doctoral student, he worked on machine learning and probabilistic inference in the late 80s. Over the past 19 years, he has held multiple roles as a partner and senior leader of Goldman Sachs, including Chief Information Officer, Chief Financial Officer, and global co-head of the Firm's largest and most complex business, the Securities Division. He also founded and led Kiodex, an early software-as-a-service company for risk analytics. Kiodex became a part of SunGard (now FIS) in 2004.