Executive education and training

Our executive education and training offering is closely tied into our strategy offering. For example for a private bank we might run a blockchain and crypto workshop based on the Security Token Certificate course we are teaching at University of Nicosia, and we would work on a suitable crypto strategy with the participants afterwards. Similarly, for crypto and blockchain startups we might run courses on the traditional financial system, allowing them to leapfrog others by not repeating the mistakes of the past.

There are a number of areas within financial services and technology where progress is so fast that most participants can not keep up without professional support, and we can help people advance more quickly and easily by running targeted executive education courses, possibly together with our partner University of Nicosia. We see the need for education and training on both sides: the old world needs to understand what is happening in start-up financial services. Already the Fintech world came somewhat of a shock to some of the more traditional institutions and they can benefits from understanding agile and design thinking practices – as well as the technology stack that comes with it – that Fintech companies employ.

However, by and large big companies do understand their start-up competition reasonably well as they still operate withing the traditional boundaries of finance, albeit often with a slightly different focus. Where things get really different however is in the crypto world that, in our view, will lead to a massive disruption in the financial services space, and this disruption will be driven by custody and cross border payments as our article in Coindesk explains.

On the other hand, a lot of the start-up companies understand technology and customers very well, but they are often not particularly conversant with the finer points of finance. This is important as in finance things tends to go well until it does not, and ultimately performance under duress is all that matters in financial services. It is for that audience that Stefan Loesch mostly wrote the book “A Guide to Financial Regulation for Fintech Entrepreneurs” (Wiley 2018) and it has been very successful. A few example for projects in this area

• Stefan Loesch is regularly teaching the Security Token Certificate at University of Nicosia which is a six week open sign-up course, but which also can be organised for interested companies. This well-tested course not only contains modules on blockchain and tokens, but also on finance, valuation, regulation and most importantly strategy and those modules can alse be taught individually.

• We can also arrange firm-specific education and training courses with our partner University of Nicosia who is one of the leading universities in the distance education space.

• We can also integrate executive education and strategy projects. Our typical client here could be an asset manager or private who is worried about the threat of disruption by crypto players on the one hand, and the likes of Robinhood on the other hand. We can organise online-workshops for key staff to learn about the key topics and at the same time facilitate the crowdsourcing of a strategic response from within the company.

• We are currently working with a start-up to create chat-bot based courses based on the material above as we believe that this is a very interesting delivery channel. Initially those courses will be small, open sign-up and free, but at a later stage we will integrate them into our executive education offering to use an even more blended learning approach.

Our approach to executive education is very much on the application. In our view, theory in this space is important not for itself, but for the results it can produce. So we generally avoid lengthy academic papers and we go for a flipped experience instead where students are being set a task with minimal explanation, and the learning is discussed afterwards. Our delivery was online even before COVID, and we understand how to build up a multi-channel engagement (video conferencing, break-out rooms, chat, co-edited documents) that keeps the students engaged and makes sure they are not stuck on their path of discovery.

We however understand that there are different learning styles, and we can adapt our delivery to the needs of the client, typically by matching them with faculty with a more traditional teaching style. One thing however we will not compromise on, and that is that in our view theory for theory’s sake has not place in executive education, so all our course are constantly asking for how the theory learned is relevant for the practitioner.