This programme offers a unique combination of finance, data science and innovation. You will learn how technological developments create both challenges and opportunities in the financial sector. Upon completion, you will be ready to apply your skills in real-world scenarios. With fluency in the languages of both the executive board and data scientists, you will become a highly sought-after intermediary with a strong financial and technological background.
This ambitious programme allows you to distinguish yourself. Admission requires a minimum average grade. The programme is more challenging in terms of time commitment than the regular MSc Finance. The study load is 84 EC instead of 60 EC. The enhanced training in coding and financial modelling aims to provide you with a competitive edge in the job market.
Note: It is still possible to switch to the regular MSc Finance programme if you feel the workload is too high during the first period of the programme.
Overview:
- Period 1. Like students in the regular MSc Finance, you follow courses on advanced corporate finance and empirical finance. As a student in the honours programme, you follow an additional course in a small-classroom setting to acquire coding skills in Python—the most widely used programming language for machine learning and artificial intelligence.
- Period 2. As a student in the honours programme, you take a specialized course in which you leverage your coding skills to solve problems in finance using machine learning techniques. You also follow a specialized course on the structure of the banking sector and the impact of fintech, as well as a course on asset pricing together with students in the regular finance programme.
- Period 3. You conduct a research project.
- Periods 4 and 5. You follow a course on important regulation for financial innovators. In addition, you broaden your skills and deepen your knowledge by selecting three electives on topics such as algorithmic trading, decentralized finance, the evolving payment landscape, financial derivatives, risk management and data mining.
- During the final periods, you write your Master’s thesis.
See the annual course overview here.
The start date of the honours programme is September 1st.