On the 6th, South Korea’s Financial Services Commission and Seoul Metropolitan City announced that they’re recruiting their first 40 graduate students for the Digital Finance MBA Program at the Yeouido Financial Graduate School which is scheduled to open in September.
The MBA program aims to foster financial-IT experts who will lead the innovation of the financial industry; it is jointly instituted by FSC, Seoul City Government and KAIST Business School. KAIST will handle all the academic courses. Professors and Fin-Tech professionals from KAIST Business School, AI Graduate School, and the Industry and Systems Engineering School will provide the lectures. Classes will be held 3 times a week, twice during the week and once in Saturday so that students can work.
The Digital Finance MBA is a part-time masters program in One IFC, and students must take 42 credits during their 4 semesters. The program allows various study-abroad programs and double-majors. The tuition is about half of other MBA programs.
The program course focuses on practical level of mathematical and quantitative education, providing courses that are related to ▲ AI and Data Science, ▲ Fin-Tech startups, and ▲ Financial Investment and Asset Management. Additionally, the candidates of Fin-Tech startup CEO who are enrolled in the program can receive a support – mentoring, legal and accounting advice, startup office, etc. – through KAIST Seoul Campus in HongReung.
Furthermore, there will be various study abroad opportunities for the students; students enrolled in the program can study a semester in Stanford, Cornell, TsingHua University and more. Or they can choose to double their degree with Michigan State. Other opportunities include practical training courses through a collaboration with Korea’s leading Fin-Tech companies.
They are looking for about 40 graduate students who are already working in financial companies and/or fin-tech related institutions (preferential to workers with more than 2 years of work experience), fin-tech entrepreneurs, and job-searching candidates for the financial industry. The application collection will begin on 15th from 10am to 5:30pm on 25th at KAIST application system (https://apply. kaist.ac.kr/GradApply/). The application documents such as transcript will be collected by Business Department Administration Team until 6 P.M. on 27th.
The results for the first round of application review will be announced on June 8th after 2pm on the KAIST application system platform. The second round of interviews will be held from 11th to 14th according to the schedules of each major. The final result will be announced on June 25th after 2pm. More details about the application process and detailed explanation on the curriculum can be found on the school website.
KAIST School of Business plans to open a non-degree program for digital finance experts starting in August; this program will have classes twice a week, 3 hours per class, and will last for 5 months. There will be team projects and study abroad opportunities for hands-on experiences. There will be two courses: Digital Transformation Course, which aims to cultivate experts in the field of digital finance, and AI and Machine Learning Course, which enables business model and solution planning/design using AI in the field. Application will begin in June.
Moreover, KAIST will have courses related to blockchain and cloud-computing big data analytics. The representative explained that they “plan to actively reflect the needs of financial institutions in their curriculum.”
