FTA - Georgia FinTech Academy

This course focuses on the payment process ecosystem, lifecycle, regulation, security, fraud protection, and payment networks. The student will learn the products and services of the payments, fraud and risk reduction strategies, and roles and responsibilities of card issuers, acquirers, merchants, and strategies for maximizing card usage while minimizing loss associated with card use. The student will also learn about payments negotiations, risk management, customer relationships, principles of authorization, settlement, chargeback, and procedures, strategies, and best practices for acquiring merchants. This course is offered through a collaborative enrollment program with the Georgia FinTech Academy.

This course examines security issues in the Payments vertical. Students explore application security addressing the challenges and weak points of applications, learn the tools and techniques of machine learning as a defensive security strategy overcoming the continuous automatic attack generated by machines, and engage in hands-on practice in penetration testing. Payments framework and standards including NIST cybersecurity framework, ISO 27001 information security management, and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) will be discussed. Administration of the information security function including strategic planning process, policies, procedures, and staffing functions necessary to organize and administer ongoing security functions will be discussed. In addition, fraud, regulation, security practices, security architecture, competitive intelligence, and operating environments are emphasized throughout the course. This course is offered through a collaborative enrollment program with the Georgia FinTech Academy.

The course covers a wide variety of electronic payment mechanisms used to make payments worldwide. The course is designed to stimulate creative thinking about the use of new technologies in the movement of money, from small peer-to-peer transactions through the largest interbank payments. Even though everyone is familiar with money on a day-to-day basis, very few people understand how money actually moves. The course covers banking systems, e-payment security, foreign exchange, Internet banking, wireless payments, stored-value cards, micropayments, peer-to-peer payments, large-scale B2B payments and the future of money. This course is offered through a collaborative enrollment program with the Georgia FinTech Academy.

The financial services industries are changing rapidly with the emergence of financial technology (FinTech). The objective of the course is to provide students with an overview of FinTech and introductions to its applications in financial services, such as commercial and investment banking, digital investing, financial advising, and insurance. Students are expected to develop a broad understanding of the recent FinTech development and its impact on different parts of the financial world. Students will also have hands-on problem-solving experiences that can be useful in FinTech applications and innovation. Topics may include but are not limited to: blockchain and cryptocurrencies, smart contracting, payments, digital banking, P2P lending, crowdfunding, robo-advising, and InsurTech. This course is offered through a collaborative enrollment program with the Georgia FinTech Academy.

This course examines the information and communications tools, technologies, and standards integral to consumer, merchant, and enterprise services in the payments and financial service sectors. Explores technology’s role in reshaping FinTech businesses. Technologies span messaging, communication networks and gateways, core processing, mobile and online software, and application program interfaces (APIs). Includes the challenges, standards, and techniques associated with securing systems and data. This course is offered through a collaborative enrollment program with the Georgia FinTech Academy.

The FinTech revolution is creating significant disruption to the traditional processes of managing and regulating financial institutions, especially banks. Understanding, assessing and forecasting FinTech’s impact on banking is particularly important because proper management and oversight of financial institutions is essential to the efficient operation of the national, as well as global, economy. In this course, students will learn about the principles and practices of commercial bank management, bank regulation, and the tradeoffs between risk and return. Challenges presented by the FinTech evolution, including traditional and emergent competitors as well as demographic, social, and technology forces driving change in the industry, will be integrated throughout the entire course. This course is offered through a collaborative enrollment program with the Georgia FinTech Academy.

This course provides the foundation for financial data analytics used in business and FinTech applications. The objective of this course is for students to gain experience in analyzing financial data using modern machine learning techniques, statistical methods, and prediction models. Students will develop computational skills to perform data analysis using a modern statistical programming environment, and apply these skills to address a range of problems encountered by business firms, including those in the FinTech industry. The topics discussed include an introduction to R language, visualization of financial data, cluster analysis, simple and multiple linear regression, classification models, high dimension data analysis using Lasso, tree regression, and model assessment and selection using cross validation. Students will have hands-on experience in the development of data analytics applications to analyze real world financial problems. This course is offered through a collaborative enrollment program with the Georgia FinTech Academy.

The purpose of this course is to introduce the student to the rapidly evolving and critical international arenas of Privacy, Information Security, and Critical Infrastructure for FinTech. This course is designed to develop knowledge and skills for security of information and information systems within FinTech organizations. It focuses on concepts and methods associated with security across several systems platforms, including internal and Internet-facing systems. The course utilizes a world view to examine critical infrastructure concepts as well as techniques for assessing risk associated with accidental and intentional breaches of security in a FinTech network. It introduces the associated issues of ethical uses of information and of privacy considerations. This course is offered through a collaborative enrollment program with the Georgia FinTech Academy.