IST 603 - Global Financial Systems Architecture

Course Description

Structures of real-world information systems in the money supply chain. Emphasis on large-scale banking organizations and their challenges in moving and processing millions of complex transactions worldwide for all types of customers.

Additional Course Description

This course focuses on developing fundamental knowledge of financial concepts, how banking and financial services work, the global nature of these industries, and the computing and information systems that have enabled today’s highly complex global financial systems. Students will apply these concepts to analyze specific financial services, companies, and regulatory institutions. They also will examine the rapidly growing financial technology (fintech) sector that is creating opportunities for new companies and challenges for the existing industry. The concepts learned will be used to examine critical issues, including the social and economic impacts of access to financial services, how algorithms may perpetuate inequality, how new technologies and business models can support economic development, and whether fintech is moving faster than the ability of national and international institutions to regulate effectively.This is a combined undergraduate/graduate course. The course instruction, materials and assignments will be the same for undergraduate and graduate students. There will be higher expectations for graduate students in quality of products and contribution.

Credit(s)

3.0

Professor of Record

Jason Dedrick

Audience

Undergraduate and Graduate students desiring an introduction to the global financial system, the information systems that support it, and new financial technologies (fintech) that are transforming the finance industry.

Learning Objectives

After taking this course, the students will be able to:

• Describe the overall structure of the global financial system.
• Describe important processes and systems that provide a wide range of consumer and commercial financial products and services.
• Recall definitions of important terms relating to financial systems.
• Define the components of financial statements for commercial firms and compare these to those of financial institutions.
• Describe the components of multinational computer and information systems and operational processes that are used to perform transactions, create services, move, analyze and store information for those financial systems. 
• Research current trends in large-scale financial systems, and describe how they are being changed by new architectures such as cloud computing.
• Identify recent and emerging financial technologies (fintech) and describe how they work and how they are changing the nature of the global financial services industry.
• Identify organizational, technological, regulatory, cultural and ethical issues that face financial institutions that operate on a global scale, and describe how these firms have succeeded or failed in addressing those issues.

Course Syllabus

IST 603/GET 302 Spring 2021 Syllabus - Jason Dedrick

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