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FINC 361

FINC 361
Financial Innovation: Features and Applications

1. Catalog Entry

FINC 361
Financial Innovation: Features and Applications

Credit hours (3)
    
This course is intended to introduce COBE students to the innovative tools to manage their personal and professional financial decisions.

2. Detailed Description of Course

Financial Innovation: Features and Applications will expose students to various new financial applications that they can apply in their personal life and professional career. In this course, Introduces students to the new developments in financial services and investments. The course will be divided into three main sections.

Section 1: Personal Finance
In this section, students will be introduced to the new methods that are very easy to use and can raise personal financial services to a new level. Examples include but not limited to the following situations:
    1) Wallet-less Payment: Payments by cash and checks are considered old business and use of credit and debit cards has
        been in practice for a long time already. Now, personal finance has become even simpler. The use of digital payment
        systems like Apple pay, Google wallet, Samsung mobile pay, to name a few has overtaken the use of credit cards and
        one can pay for services and products without reaching to their wallet or taking cards out to swipe. A one touch on
        your smart phone is all it takes to take care of all the payments options.
    2) Paperless selling: Introduce students to apps and websites that allow people to sell the products online, offer
        platform to individuals to post the products for bidding purposes, and in turn deliver the product and collecting
        the payments.
    3) Credit checking: Expose students to the apps and websites that can help them to check their credit and analyze the
        score.
    4) Digital Checks (Check 21): What is Check 21 act and how it improves the efficiency of check clearance among banks,
        role of the Federal Reserve in this activity, and how apps and financial institutions’ websites can be used for
        sending digital image of checks as a substitute for physical delivery.
    5) Online banking: How one can link his/her bank account to pay for regular payments without writing a check physically
        by using online banking services offered by banks.

Section 2: Investment and Financing
    1) Motif Investing: Think like a portfolio manager and act like a professional trader. An innovative way to create your
        own portfolio, you can even buy fraction of shares and create a portfolio of up to 30 securities at a very low cost
        just like professional managers do. You can put your portfolio for public display and your ideas are even eligible to
        generate royalty payments for you if others are using or rebalancing your motif.
    2) Bitcoin: What is a bitcoin, how one can earn returns on it, how can it be used as a substitute for currency, what could
        be the potential issues of its use in the future.
    3) Invest globally without owning an individual stock: The use of ETFs that can give you market exposure at a low cost and
        you can even buy a portfolio of stocks that you may not be able to own directly.
    4) Crowd Funding: What it is, how it is different from others, and what it can be used for.

Section 3: Corporate Finance
    1) Securitization of Debt by Financial Institutions: How banks can recover original loan amount by creating securities.
    2) Catastrophe Bonds and Weather Bonds: Special types of bonds issued by corporations to raise money. These types of
        offerings not only offer a platform to issuers to raise money, but also used by them as hedging tools against adverse
        natural disasters and at the same time offer investors diversification and varying yields.


3. Detailed Description of Conduct of Course

It is intended that this course will be first developed as an on campus course, then also offered as a hybrid course and eventually made available entirely online. This course is intended to include lectures, outside readings, customized chapters, among other resources.
 
4. Goals and Objectives of the Course

Students will gain the knowledge of new financial products and techniques available in the market place and gain confidence to apply those techniques for personal and professional decisions.

Specific Learning Outcomes: Students will be able to:
    1) Describe new financial products available in the market.
    2) Outline and discuss the applications of new financial products.
    3) Apply the new financial techniques in their personal and professional decisions.
    4) Compare and contrast those new financial products with existing financial products.

5. Assessment Measures

Students’ progress may be measured by their performance on assignments, tests, term papers, and in class presentations & discussions.

6. Other Course Information

None.

Review and Approval

June 20, 2015