Financial technology, commonly referred to as fintech, continues to transform daily life, and Oliver Yao, the new dean at the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, has stated that the University of Delaware’s vision for collaboration on technical innovation was one of the reasons that drew him to the Lerner job.
UD has established a Fintech Innovation Hub on the STAR Campus. About half the space is devoted to UD-based work and the other half is home to fintech-related startups, data analytics firms, software developers and financial services firms. Numerous Lerner professors are currently conducting research in the fintech area, and presented their findings last month at the Lerner Faculty Showcase
Fintech is a term that covers a lot of territory – artificial intelligence, privacy, blockchain, cloud computing, IT ethics and cybersecurity to name a few. Should firms allow their CIOs to sit on the boards of other companies? How can we best measure disclosure quality? What motivates or prevents people from investing in NFTs?
These questions and many others were addressed in four minute FinTech Lightning talks, attended by faculty and students, by our faculty, including Dean Oliver Yao, and Accounting and MIS Professors Asli Basoglu, Bintong Cheng, John D’Arcy, Xiao Fang, Jing He, Michael Jung, Ahmad Rabaa’i, and Jiaheng Xie. Our department is an ideal blend of expertise in financial information (FIN) and in technology (TECH), and we expect to contribute significantly to this new initiative.