FinTech is Dead, Long Live Finance: The Case for Curricular Integration

Financial Technology (FinTech) should no longer be taught as a standalone subject in graduate finance programs. A decade ago, dedicated courses made sense when the technology was experimental. Today, FinTech mediates virtually every financial process, yet curricula maintain an artificial separation that leaves students unprepared. In a recent opinion piece, published in the Journal of Alternative Finance, I argue that the category of education we created needs to dissolve into the core finance curriculum.

Imagine a finance professor teaching a derivatives class. A student asks why they are studying the Black-Scholes formula without discussing the concentrated liquidity mechanisms of decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, which now processes billions in monthly volume. Or consider a computer science professor teaching machine learning who cannot explain its application to algorithmic trading, which now accounts for over 70% of total trading volume on the US stock market.

The industry has moved on: BlackRock and Franklin Templeton tokenize money market funds on public blockchains. Machine learning drives investment decisions at quant funds managing hundreds of billions in aggregate. Aave, a decentralized lending protocol, manages over USD 35 billion in loans through smart contracts rather than loan officers. Yet many finance curricula still treat FinTech as a curious addition rather than the operating system of modern finance.

The Costs of Separation

The current curricular divide, where FinTech is treated as a trend or a specialized elective, leaves graduates with fragmented knowledge. Students often learn about collateralized lending in one course and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols in another, failing to recognize that automated liquidations in blockchain-based lending address the same fundamental risks as traditional margin calls.

The disconnect shows in hiring outcomes. A recent survey found that 77% of graduates learned more in their first six months on the job than during their entire undergraduate education. Financial services recruitment firm Selby Jennings reports that banks now prioritize candidates with data analysis, AI, and digital infrastructure expertise alongside traditional financial modelling skills, yet most finance programs continue to treat these as separate domains.

This gap also has institutional costs. Business schools increasingly lose students to computer science departments because students perceive technical skills as more marketable. The result is a workforce split between finance professionals who lack technical fluency and technologists who lack a deep understanding of financial theory and regulation.

What Integration Looks Like

Integration does not mean eliminating FinTech; it means absorbing it into existing finance courses. Conceptually, FinTech is ‘both extremely important and nothing special’ (inspired by Edmans’ treatment of ESG). It is important because it is ubiquitous, but it is ‘nothing special’ in that it requires no separate pedagogical silo.

I propose a four-step framework for integrating these concepts into any finance course:

1. Establish Financial Theory: Start with foundational concepts (eg price discovery, liquidity).

2. Examine Empirical Evidence: Review current academic articles, market patterns and data.

3. Demonstrate Technological Reshaping: Show how emerging tools (eg algorithmic trading) improve or alter processes.

4. Explore Business Model Innovation: Analyse how new structures (eg automated market makers) influence existing frameworks.

The framework applies equally to regulation and compliance. Securities law courses already teach anti-money laundering requirements and know-your-customer procedures. Zero-knowledge proofs now enable privacy-preserving compliance, allowing parties to verify information without revealing underlying personal data. Self-sovereign identity frameworks give individuals control over their credentials. Students who encounter these technologies only in an elective FinTech course will struggle to connect them to the regulatory principles they learn elsewhere.

A Path Forward for Faculty

The primary hurdle to the proposed integration is expertise. A professor brilliant at option pricing may lack a blockchain background. To solve this, institutions could lean into team-teaching arrangements between finance and computer science faculty or utilize professors of practice who bridge the gap between rigorous theory and industry innovation.

Assessment methods also should evolve accordingly. An international finance assignment might ask students to calculate settlement costs for a cross-border transaction via SWIFT versus stablecoin rails. A corporate finance case study could require evaluating whether a security token offering makes sense for a particular firm. These assessments signal that mastery means understanding financial principles deeply enough to evaluate implementations.

The era of FinTech as a standalone category served its purpose by creating space for experimentation. That era has ended. Our responsibility as educators is to prepare students for finance as it operates today; where digital counterparts and traditional markets are one and the same. FinTech is dead. Long live finance.

Read the author’s article.

Daniel Liebau is a Lecturer at ESSEC Business School