One classroom at the University of Kentucky, one at UPC in Lima, and a semester spent on a single question: why does the same financial problem — moving money, borrowing, insuring risk, saving for old age — get answered so differently in each country? Four modules, four workshops where you design a product and defend it, and a final project of your own.
Jump to the class scheduleYou are enrolled either at the University of Kentucky (UK) in Lexington or at Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC) in Lima. Both classes meet together online, on the same schedule, doing the same work — and from the second week you sit in a team with students from the other country. Each university grades its own students on its own scale.
The course is built around one idea: the same financial problem gets solved differently in different countries, and the reasons are worth understanding. Moving money, lending, insuring risk, saving for old age — every country has answered these, and no two have answered them the same way. Most weeks you read how one country does something and how another does the same thing, then work out why they differ.
What makes that work is that somebody in the room actually uses the system under discussion. When we study Peruvian payments, half the class uses Yape every day. When we study American insurance, the other half has an auto policy. That is the point of running this course across two countries rather than reading about both from one.
These are the course learning outcomes. They are the same for every delivery of Global Financial Innovation, and everything on the schedule below is here to serve one or more of them.
Each module ends in a three-session workshop where your team designs a financial product for a real market and defends it. You will do this five times — four workshops, and then the final project, which is the same work at greater length and on a country you choose yourselves. They all run the same way — the workshop guide explains the three-day flow, your role, and what you hand in. Read the case pack before the first session of each one.
In a market an incumbent already owns, where is the opening?
Two graduates in Lima want to start a fintech. Their payments app dies against a market where one app already has 20 million users.
Who does American insurance price out, and can you insure them anyway?
A contractor who cannot get affordable liability cover; a renter who has never bought renters’ insurance and does not know why she would.
What do you build in a country that does not issue its own money?
Nine in ten Malians work informally and most finance arrives through a phone. A founder building in Mali joins the second session and attacks every team’s idea.
Design something better than both the AFP and the 401(k).
Peru privatized pensions in 1993 and has let people withdraw the money eight times since 2020. The US made saving voluntary and half of households never started.
The workshop guide explains how all four workshops run — the three-day flow, the four roles, every deadline, and what your one-page brief has to contain. It is the same for all four, so you read it once. The team schedule tells you which team you are on and which role you hold, for all four workshops at once. You will need both before the first workshop in September.
The four workshops teach the method on markets we hand you. The final project asks you to run it yourself, on a market you pick.
This is the fifth product you will design this semester, and the only one you take past a three-minute pitch. You pick the country. It can be one you know well or one you do not — that is your call, and it should follow from the idea rather than the other way round.
Final project teams are formed within your own university, not across the two. They are not your workshop teams. Groups, roles and the full brief are set later in the semester — there is nothing to arrange now.
The full brief, the deliverables and the marking criteria come in November. What is fixed now is the shape: a new fintech idea, a country you choose, and the six questions above. If you want to start thinking early, read a country track that interests you.
How each brief is marked, and four worked examples of a full-mark brief, are in the workshop guide. Everything you submit in the workshops is individual. Nothing you hand in depends on a teammate finishing their part, and no meeting outside class is ever required. The final project is the one piece of team work, and it is built during class time in the last three weeks.
| What | When | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Role brief ×4 | Mon 14 Sep Mon 5 Oct Mon 26 Oct Mon 16 Nov 18:00 Lima · 19:00 Lexington (18:00 Lexington in November) |
One page, written by you, from the role you hold in that workshop — Founder, Analyst, Customer or Skeptic. Posted in your team folder the evening before the third session, so your teammates can read it. The workshop guide gives the prompts for each role, and the team schedule tells you which role you hold. |
| Final project | 24 Nov — 10 Dec | Kickoff on 24 November, two studio sessions, and presentations on 10 December. Teams are formed within your own university. The full brief and what you hand in come in November. |
The workshop pitch is spoken, not submitted. Your team presents for three minutes in the third session of each workshop and takes questions. Nothing is handed in from it — the writing you submit is your own one-page brief.
Your final project country is your choice. Mali, Kenya, India, China, Morocco, France and Spain all have full tracks on this site, so the research is available to you from the start — but you are not limited to them.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 75 minutes. Every module runs the same shape: two lectures, a three-session workshop, and a recap. Readings are due before the session they sit under. Pre-class readings are done before the session; optional ones go deeper and can be skipped without breaking the sequence.
One note about the clock. Peru does not change its clocks and the United States does. Until the end of October, Lima is one hour behind Lexington; from 3 November they are the same, so the joint session moves an hour later for students in Lima. It is marked on the schedule below.
Three sessions to build the teams that will hold all semester, and to establish the one habit the whole course runs on: read about yourself, then read about them, then talk. There are no lesson readings for the first class.
The course is its own first case. From week two you sit in a binational team, on shared deadlines, taught by two institutions on two different calendars — and you will disagree about things that are not disagreements of fact. Notice what that requires of you before you start analysing anyone else's system.
Each cohort meets alone. What the course is, how the two classes work together, how the workshops run, and what you hand in.
The cohorts meet. Three short mixed breakouts, reshuffled in between, so you talk to six or seven people from the other university rather than the same three twice. No finance today, and no readings due.
Both instructors, and how the two classes fit together.
You get your student number — US01–US25 or P01–P25. It does not change all semester.
Your favourite film, band or album — not your country’s, yours. You are looking for the person in the group who loves the same one.
What the semester looks like from where you are sitting, week by week.
One dish they have to try if they come to you, and one they should be warned about — and where you would actually go to get it.
Where the readings live, how a workshop runs across three days, and what you hand in.
One place you would send them for a weekend, and it cannot be the obvious one. Not Machu Picchu. Not the Derby.
The semester schedule, what is due before Tuesday, and one word each on how you are feeling about it.
Why the same problem gets different answers. The premise of the course, set out once, properly.
Everyone in Peru already has Yape. The module asks what you build when an incumbent already owns the market — and the Peruvian half of every team has been using that incumbent daily for years.
Yape reached roughly 20 million people in a country where most work informally. Every one of them is now legible — to a bank, to the tax authority, to a platform. Inclusion and visibility are the same infrastructure seen from two positions, and the person declining a digital wallet may have a reason worth hearing.
Read the workshop case pack Part 1 before this session. Class time is for building, not reading.
The roles reverse. US insurance is state-regulated, agent-distributed, and increasingly priced by models nobody can fully explain — and the Peruvian half of the room gets to ask why a country this rich needs to invent this at all.
A model that prices risk more accurately makes some people cheaper to insure and some uninsurable. Perfect prediction is the end of insurance rather than its perfection, because a pool only works when the insurer doesn't know exactly who will claim. Who decides which variables may be priced on, and on what authority?
By the insurance workshop you should be able to say why a claims model built on machine learning is a fairness problem and not just a speed problem.
No class in Peru: Combate de Angamos. Quiz 2 opens after Day 3. First peer evaluation.
Neutral ground, on purpose. Neither cohort can coast on local knowledge, which makes this the semester’s real test of comparative reasoning — and Mali is the one country in the catalog that does not issue its own money.
In January 2022 a country's access to its own reserves was switched off from a central bank in another capital. Sovereignty is not an abstraction in this module. And Direction D asks you to build a private record of who everyone is, in a country with an active conflict — a dangerous object regardless of the founder's intentions.
Every student submits one written question for the guest founder by end of day.
Guest: a founder building in Mali. Nobody in either class has been there, so he is the one person who can tell you what is actually true.
No US class: fall break. Professor Hadden is in Lima with the UPC class in person.
The mirror image of Module 3: both cohorts are home. The AFP system and the 401(k) are the same problem answered two ways, and both are being watched to see how they fail.
Both countries put retirement risk on the individual. Automatic enrolment is the most effective intervention anyone has found and it works by using inertia against people’s stated behaviour; Peru’s Congress released the savings eight times because voters wanted it released. Whose judgement should win, and who pays when it is wrong?
Teams for the final project are formed within each university rather than across them, and they are not the workshop teams. Groups, roles and the full brief are set later in the semester.
A fintech product is never neutral. Somebody is included by it, somebody is priced out of it, and somebody’s data ends up somewhere. Say who, before you present it.
Peru works.
Dec 9, Battle of Ayacucho, is also a Peruvian holiday but falls on a Wednesday.
Eight minutes plus four minutes of fire. Tue Dec 15 is available as a second day if 10 teams need it.
Held in reserve. Probably unused.