Integrating Informatics Into Graduate Finance Programs
Integrating Informatics Into Graduate Finance Programs

Summary/Abstract: Over the last couple of decades, increasing number of financial institutions have recognized the need for hiring employees who have higher competences in technology, information systems, and database management. Information technology knowledge has become essential for performing most of the tasks within financial institutions. Graduates that have received some form of IT training while pursuing their finance degrees have become more competitive in the workplace and have obtained higher paid and more rewarding jobs. The need for IT competences in the financial industry is expected to continue to increase in the future. Consequently, the need to equip finance students with necessary informatics skills will increase as well. The current and future financial professional will have to learn how to collect, process, and manage data to support fast-pace-environment action-taking, and prompt decision making. Given that the finance education curricula are already pretty intense, with high number of required and elective courses, the educational challenge of today is to find a model that will include the IT component within the finance curricula, and at the same time not increase in the major way the number of courses required for obtaining a finance master’s degree. There are two solutions that we propose in this paper. First is to Vodenska, Chitkushev, Zlateva integrate informatics-based projects into graduate finance courses in order to enhance information technology content within the finance graduate programs. The second proposed option is to include a comprehensive Financial Informatics course in the curriculum. We have implemented both options and are presenting each approach.

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