Let's take a look at what a learning plan is over the next four courses. As we have discussed, we have defined FinTech very broadly as technological innovations that improve how money and capital are transferred, raised, and invested. Therefore, our courses will be structured as deep dives into each of these three segments, and analyze both the technology and the business side of innovations in these segments. Feel free to take these courses in any order that works best for you. Our first two courses look at FinTech innovations in the capital transfer sector. They're about the digital challengers to financial institutions that promised to make paying for things and getting paid faster, cheaper, and more secure. In the first course, which we'll call PayTech, we'll examine the payment innovations that do not rely on decentralized technologies such as blockchain. A good example of this type of innovation is the digital and mobile wallet, for instance, PayPal, Venmo, and Apple Android Pay. We will first look at how things are traditionally done before these innovations and connect this specific inefficiencies of these practices to the specific technological advantages of the innovations. We'll also look at the business side into how to leverage the data advantage of the new technology to build entire payment ecosystems. To give you a broad exposure, we'll look at building the PayTech business from multiple angles, both in the market with good existing payment infrastructure and in markets where there's none and where things had to be built completely from scratch. The second course in the series, which we call CryptoFinance, examines payment innovations that do use decentralization. We'll first look at the technical aspects of the blockchain, which powers the thousands of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. As usual, we'll identify the specific advantages of blockchain's decentralized record-keeping technology and connect them to current inefficiencies in the transaction system. On the business side, we'll first look at the angle of blockchain as a tradable asset. That is, the market dynamics of cryptocurrencies, how they're priced, and their role vis-a-vis fiat currencies such as a dollar. We'll then look at the angle of blockchain as a business and show you some real experiences and lessons from growing a new business idea based on the blockchain into a profitable company. The next course in our series, which we call CreditTech, looks at how FinTech is helping both individuals and businesses raise capital more broadly and more efficiently. We'll start with how things are currently done and how credit actually works from both a finance and a statistical point of view. Then we will deep dive into how FinTech is disrupting this equilibrium. We'll first look at the lending market and see how peer to peer based platform lending could expand credit access to both individuals and small businesses and how to translate this customer expansion into profitability. We'll then turn to the equity side and see how our traditional initial public stock offerings, or the IPO, could be complemented by the myriad of new funding opportunities enabled by online crowdfunding and also by crypto token based fundraising vehicles such as the Initial Coin Offering. We'll then combine these markets together and look at how FinTech disruptors are competing on the entire fundraising spectrum and how incumbents, our existing financial institutions like banks, should respond. The fourth course of the series is called InvestTech, and not surprisingly, it deal with how FinTech is fundamentally changing the way that we invest money. On the technology side, we'll deep dive in the application machine learning and artificial intelligence and see how they could help us better select stocks for more targeted portfolios and manage our long-term investments. We'll also look at how big data, particularly new unstructured data from mobile sources and social media, could help better understand the consumers and better plan their wealth. On the business side, we'll examine the business models of the new robo-advisors, which combined online platforms with machine learning to deliver customized financial advice at a low cost. Hopefully by now, you'll notice a common theme from these descriptions, that is the intricate link between the technology and the finance. In the world of FinTech, there are many finance talents and there are many tech talents. The emerging problem is that sometimes, there is a communication barrier between the two sides. The finance people don't understand the technology well enough to make the customer's pitch, and then the tech people don't understand finance well enough to design the optimal product. The goal of this series is to bridge this gap. Throughout the courses, we'll learn to be well-versed in the languages of both tech and finance. We'll have a good knowledge of the course FinTech concepts and connect these technical know-how to both financial theories and market practices so that we could be an effective communicator between the tech and finance sides, decipher FinTech beyond just the buzzwords, understand their specific value propositions, and provide critical judgments on new technological ventures.
