Hi, my name is Stefan Henningsson. I'm an Associate Professor here at Copenhagen Business School in Copenhagen, Denmark. It's a great pleasure to welcome you to innovation strategy, developing your FinTech strategy. As you may well know, this is the third course in specialization on the digital transformation of financial services. The course is assigned to stand on its own, but if you haven't already taken the first two courses, I recommend you to do so. I promise, they're very interesting. So in this opening video, we are going to spend a little time to talk about the framing and the motivation behind this course. Do you think that digital innovations are going to be an important part of how companies in the finance service industries compete in the future? There are many reasons to think so. In the previously very conservative financial industries, FinTech is now the word on everyone's lips. Investments in FinTech has grown almost exponentially over the last couple of years to reach 25 billion US dollars in 2016. Now, almost all traditional companies in the finance service industries have ramped up their investments in innovative technology. And more than half of the bank says that they are actively looking at external sources for acquisitions, partnerships, and accelerators that would give them access to exciting technology. So even if we don't know exactly what will happen with finance, it's quite certain that innovation would be a critical component of how companies compete in the financial services industries. Now, the bad news are that innovation is hard because companies are stuck in doing business in the way that once made them great, and they struggle to find their ways into the digital era. On the other hand, the good news is that if we can nail this challenge, if we can find a way to develop an effective FinTech innovation strategy, then we set us apart from the pack. Then we find an advantage that is not based on historical paths but on the ability to create the future. This course is all about targeting that problem, how to escape the historical past and to develop a FinTech strategy to compete on innovation in the digital era of finance. To do this, we have two key questions in the course that we would keep coming back to. The first one is, what do we want to achieve with our FinTech strategy? We addressed this question in the first module of the course. The question is basically about the problem we want to solve in our FinTech strategy. We can't have a discussion about FinTech innovation without knowing where we're heading, so we're going to start in this end. The second question is then, how do we develop a FinTech strategy to achieve our goals? We addressed these questions in modules two and three. In the search for tools that can make us innovative, we have to look both at the arrangements to create internal innovation and ways to channel innovations quite by others. Then in the fourth model of the course, you will use what you learned to develop a FinTech strategy for a real world company. When we're working to answer these questions, we're going to look at examples both from the financial industries but also from other digital industries. We can learn from companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon, but we have to be careful here. Finance is not like any other industry, and a bank may have many differences if you compare it to Google. To understand how ideas about innovation from Google translates into our world, we will look at many real world examples from the most innovative companies in the industry. One company that we're going to look at more closely is Danske Bank. You will hear more about them in a few minutes. Danske Bank is one of the traditional banks that are leading the digital transformation of finance. It's a bank that has won numerous innovation awards and is behind some of the greatest digital innovations successes in Europe. We will study their approaches to innovation and hear from the bank itself about how it pushes to be relevant in the digital era. So, welcome to the course. Let's get going.