This fall term, the Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISE) department began enrolling Ph.D. students in a new financial technology (FinTech) certificate program. The certificate focuses on new technologies and analytics for financial services with the objective of educating students in current applications, methods and benefits for the range of services.

The program is currently targeted at graduate students with an interest in completing the certificate as part of a degree program, as well as post-baccalaureate, non-degree students interested in doing a standalone certificate credential. The program is intended to address the rapidly expanding FinTech industry in the state of Florida, specifically a new presence of major banking and financial investment firms/corporations in the South Florida/West Palm Beach area.

“This new certificate is another step in our efforts to address the technical academic needs of the finance industry in Florida at the graduate level,” said David Kaber, Dean’s Leadership Professor and ISE chair. “Our Ph.D. concentration and FinTech certificate are stepping stones to our current development of a new master’s in financial engineering to be delivered through UF’s new West Palm Beach Campus.”

This certificate was born-out of a prior collaboration between ISE and the University of Florida Warrington College of Business Finance Department, specifically a Ph.D. interdisciplinary concentration in Quantitative Finance. This concentration has drawn-in several Ph.D. students over the years, who have been jointly supervised by faculty in ISE and Finance. Coursework requirements have included financial theory (from Finance), stochastic differential equations and financial derivatives (from Mathematics), applied time series analysis (from Statistics) and stochastic optimization (from ISE) as a sample from a total of 11 courses in the concentration. The new FinTech certificate requirements are similarly challenging, including advanced engineering economy, empirical asset pricing, machine learning and AI, introduction to stochastic optimization, and financial investments. The prerequisites for the program are demanding as well, including statistics, probability theory, and asset pricing theory among several other base knowledge needs. The certificate coursework is delivered jointly by ISE and Finance faculty with diverse quantitative and domain expertise to enrich the breadth of student learning.

“These are exciting developments for our department and the university,” Dr. Kaber said. “ISE sees Warrington as an outstanding partner in academic program development and graduate student research supervision.”