Consumer Finance and FinTech
Explores consumer finance and how disruptors use technology to change business models, products, and competition. A review of the major consumer sectors ¿ consumer credit, investing, trading, payments, and insurance ¿ provides students with a solid understanding of how technology, products, funding, regulation, and customer experience shape these markets. Students evaluate competitive dynamics amongst FinTech startups, "Big Finance," and "Big Tech." Topics include: payment apps, neo-banks, mortgage originators, brokerage apps, robo-advisors, peer-to-peer lending, insurtech, crypto assets, and prediction markets.
Spring 2018 · Consumer Finance: Markets, Product Design, and FinTech
This course provides a solid understanding of consumer decision-making and how new products and services are developed, especially given the rapid pace of innovation and regulatory change, to help students succeed in consumer finance today. Specific examples will be drawn from retirement saving products, credit cards, peer to peer lending, cryptocurrencies, and financial advising.
Readings
- How people should behave: economic models of household financial behavior
- Textbook summary of traditional economic model: Chapters 4.1 and 4.A in Abel, Andrew B., Ben Bernanke, and Dean Croushore, Macroeconomics , Pearson, 2013. ISBN: 978-0132992282.
- Chapter 2 in Ang, Andrew, Asset Management , Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0199959327.
- How people do behave: behavioral biases, financial decisions, and markets
- Chapter 4 in Wilkison, N. and M. Klaes, An Introduction to Behavioral Economics , 2nd Edition, Revised, 2012. ISBN: 978-0230291461.
- Chapters 6 and 8 in Wilkison, N. and M. Klaes, An Introduction to Behavioral Economics , 2nd Edition, Revised, 2012. ISBN: 978-0230291461.
- Chapter 6 in Thaler, Richard H. and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness , Yale University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0143115267.
- Orszag, Jonathan and Susan Manning, “An Economic Assessment of Regulating Credit Card Fees and Interest Rates,” 2007. Sections I and II, pp. 1-28.
- Chapter 1 in Stone, C. A. and Anne Zissu, The Securitization Markets Handbook: Structures and Dynamics of Mortgage- and Asset-backed Securities , Bloomberg Press, Second Edition, 2012. ISBN: 978-1118006740.
Prerequisites & course information
Prereq: None. Coreq: 15.401 , 15.414 , or 15.415 G (Fall) 3-0-6 units
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026–2027
- MIT OpenCourseWare ↗Spring 2018
- MIT OCW readings ↗
- MIT OCW calendar ↗
- MIT OCW syllabus ↗
- Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.