MSc Finance & Information Technology

Designed by finance professionals for aspiring finance professionals, our brand new MSc in Finance & IT is specifically aimed at graduates in computer science and related areas who want to pursue a career in finance. Incorporating intensive finance training with tailored IT modules, we will provide you with the tools you need for a successful financial career.

£2m of WBS scholarships announced for 2012.

Join us to explore:

• the principles of modern finance theory
• the complex questions faced by industry professionals
• analytical techniques and methods
• the characteristics of financial instruments and markets
• the construction of portfolios of assets with particular characteristics
• how to measure performance
• current issues in IT including: strategic development of systems; management and implementation problems and solutions; decisions relating to organisational form and governance
• existing research and scholarship to identify potential new approaches.

A word from Mark Taylor, Dean and Professor of International Finance at WBS and former Managing Director at BlackRock

Before becoming Dean of WBS I was a Managing Director of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, where I was responsible for the management of a large investment fund. That experience taught me how much the financial sector relies on a sophisticated IT platform and needs able IT graduates to develop that platform. Two further things struck me, however.

The first was that IT graduates often have no background in the financial products and processes that they are employed to support, making their job difficult. The second was that many highly able IT graduates who enter the finance industry are limited in their career path for the same reason. They lack the broad financial training to move into other functions such as trading or asset management. Our new MSc in Finance & IT is designed to remedy those problems. I took detailed advice from a number of my former colleagues in the finance industry to come up with a programme that really meets the needs of the financial sector.

Our MSc in Finance & IT equips IT graduates to enter the finance industry with a confident knowledge of financial products and processes and an advanced training in the IT topics that they will find most useful in their chosen career. It will also provide them with the financial training that will allow them to move later into other functions or to enter straight into other computing-intensive finance roles such as quantitative investment management.

The Academic Director of the course is Professor Söhnke M. Bartram, who previously worked in quantitative investment research as Head of the London Advanced Research Center for State Street Global Advisors, a major asset management company.