Welcome to the last part of this course, where we talk about the final project. Let me introduce you to what we're going to ask you to do for the final project for this course, and you won't be doing this unless you are getting a certificate. If you are getting your certificate, you will need to complete the final project, and look at what other people have done for the final project. So let me talk you through what we're going to ask you to do. First, the theme of the final project is, what should regulators do? Now, it needs to be do about something because it's too broad of a topic to say what should regulators do about everything. Every regulator, every area of FinTech, it's too much. So, we're going to ask you to focus on one of four areas. We're going to ask you to either focus on cryptocurrencies and ICOs, which you may find exciting, and there's a lot of activity there. There's a lot of worry for regulators as to what should they do and different approaches in different markets. Or virtual banking, branchless banks, banks and apps, non-bank banks. So, virtual banking of various types. Somewhat related to banking, but not exactly virtual banks, is peer-to-peer lending. Could be business to business lending, could be personal lending, but we're looking there at loans online. Investing in loans to individuals or groups of individuals or borrowing for your business or for personal online peer to peer lending in general, and how should regulators treat that? So non-bank lending. Non-bank branches, part two. Part three, non-bank lending. Part four is non-bank payment systems. These are things like Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Alipay, or WePay in China or Tencent service. So, these are virtual payment systems which could include game cards, could include things like octopus in Hong Kong for subway and many other payments who pay for soda pop with your Octopus card. It's virtual currency. So payment systems, not cryptocurrencies because these are not cryptos, these are virtual currencies is stored value cards or other forms of virtual payment systems. So, one of these four areas, pick one, your choice. Pick one one and then explore more deeply. On your own, go to the internet, find out more information, and write a report. We're also going to ask you to look at a market, but we'll come back to that because we'll have two parts to this assignment. One is what's happening and the second is what should my regulator do in my market, and then we'll pick one of foreign markets, but we'll come back to that. So, first, two parts to this project, the first part is, what's going on? What are other governments doing? What's the UK doing? What's the US doing? What's Japan doing? What's South Korea doing? What's China doing? What's happening worldwide in the application you picked and how our regulators around the world approaching this. So, this is your fact-based. This is your research. You're going to do your research on your own searching on the internet and you're going to write a report of, I recommend, 2,000-3,000 words. Now, that's not a rigid recommendation, and I'm not saying it has to be pros, it could be bullet points, it could be slides, it could be spreadsheets, could be pictures, but something in the order of magnitude of 2,000-3,000 words which if you want to translate that into pages is four to six pages. That's the recommended length. If you can make your point and make your case in less words and do a good job, fine, I don't care. You don't have to meet a rigid minimum. If you need to take a few words more than 3,000 words, we'll get over it, but don't go too long because longer is not necessarily better. Managers are busy. If they asked you for 2,000-3,000 word report or 46-page report, they probably don't want to see 10 pages because that's going to be too much to read and they're going to feel annoyed that you're making them do too much work to read what you've written up couldn't you write it shorter. In fact, they'd even prefer an executive summary up front to say bottom line here's what I found. Give it to me in a page. It's not bad especially if you can do it well. I've often found in my own life though it takes longer to write a short report than it does long. Okay. Part two of this assignment is to make a pitch to your regulator. For that, you're going to pick one of four regulators and we're to come back to this idea of markets or themes and I'm going to ask you to look at one of four regulatory environments: Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, or South Korea. Pick one. Now, I've intentionally avoided the largest countries in the world. I've intentionally avoided the US, the UK, France because you're going to probably focus more on those in your research report of what are other countries doing. So, you'll have looked at what are they doing, but if you're a regulator in Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, or South Korea, you'll want to know what the big guys are doing, but you want to think could I gain a competitive advantage? Could I do something different? What it makes sense for me to have a different perspective than the UK or France or Switzerland? So, pick one of these four countries, any that you find you have some affinity to or preference for and make a report to the regulator and say what should you be doing? You might want to know what the regular is doing in that country. Perhaps as part of your part one of this assign. Now, what is this pitch? The pitch could be a video, a 5-10 minutes, and that's my preference. But I've had some students say a video is too hard Dr. Clark. My bandwidth is slow. I'm in India or I'm somewhere else and the Internet is not that great and producing a video and uploading it's going to take me forever. If you prefer to write a report, you can do that. So, again, a 2,000-3,000 page report. Fine. That's fine substitute for a video. But I recommend when you're making a pitch, your pitch is probably going to be more persuasive if you make it in your own voice, and it's good practice for you as a manager in a FinTech area or as part of a regulatory environment to make your pitch. Make it in person. Make it seem real. This is what I recommend, 5-10 minutes, that's maybe all the time you're going to have. In real life as well. So make your pitch. So, that's your assignment. What should I able to do about Application X in finance market Y? Pick one of four applications and one of four markets such as virtual banking in Dubai. That could be your focus. Now, there's no right answers for this assignment. We're not asking you to come up with the right recommendation. We're asking you to make a persuasive and convincing pitch, to make an argument, to get the arguments right, to have some facts behind you, to know something about what other people are doing and draw analogies too, and say we should be following the pattern set by France or Switzerland and not what the UK has done. Or we should follow the US model because of something. So, we want to know what other people are doing and we want to have a point of view. We want to have a point of view which is useful, not say, I don't know what we should do because that's not very useful, and you'd like to be able to have some influence on a regulator. So, you want to make a convincing, persuasive, meaningful argument, you want to have thought some about why does this argument makes sense in my market, it would be more persuasive, more convincing, and more influential if there was some reason or tie why your argument fits well for this market. So, that's your assignment, and you will give peer grading to others based on how persuasive or convincing they are. Whether they're a useful point of view that might influence a regulator. Thank you.
