A free, structured curriculum that teaches financial principles through international examples — from Tokyo savings to Lagos microloans, from German pensions to Brazilian bonds. Built for self-study; designed for understanding.
Each track covers one domain of financial life or practice. The complete tracks (Foundations, Corporate Finance, Venture Finance, and the full Banking pair) appear first. Banking is the first of the paired sector tracks — a classic track on how the system works today, joined to a complete Innovation companion that opens on the problems the classic system leaves unsolved and follows them through to the solutions. The remaining tracks are sketched here as a roadmap for what's coming — pick the one closest to what you'd most like to learn next.
Bond pricing, duration and convexity, credit spreads, the yield curve, and the mechanics of the world's largest securities market. From sovereign Treasuries to leveraged loans.
Forwards, futures, options, and swaps — what they are, how they're priced, and why every modern financial system depends on them. Black-Scholes, hedging, and structured products.
How sell-side and buy-side analysts build company models, write reports, and form views. Industry analysis, channel checks, earnings models, and the craft of investment recommendations.
Reading a firm as a creditor rather than an equity holder. Cash flow coverage, covenants, credit ratings, default prediction, and the discipline of asking what could go wrong.
Market microstructure, order types, liquidity, market-making, high-frequency trading, and the empirical evidence on what works (and what doesn't) in active trading.
Distressed debt, merger arbitrage, spinoffs, restructurings, and other corporate events. How specialists make money on situations that don't fit standard valuation frameworks.
The economics of pooling risk. Underwriting, reserves, reinsurance, and the unique financial structure of insurance companies — why they look so different from banks on a balance sheet.
The rails of modern commerce. Card networks, ACH, real-time payments, cross-border remittances, and the rise of stablecoins as payment infrastructure.
Neobanks, banking-as-a-service, open banking APIs, and how digital-native financial firms have reshaped what a bank looks like. The case studies and the business models.
Decentralized finance built on public blockchains. Automated market makers, lending protocols, stablecoins, and a clear-eyed look at what crypto does and doesn't replicate from traditional finance.
Fiduciary duty, conflicts of interest, fairness, and the recurring ethical problems of finance — front-running, mis-selling, market manipulation, fraud. The CFA-style framework plus real cases.
ESG investing, climate finance, impact measurement, and the honest empirical debate about whether and when sustainability and returns align. Standards, disclosures, and greenwashing.
The actual jobs in finance — what bankers, traders, analysts, PMs, regulators, and treasurers really do. How to get in, how to choose between paths, and what each role costs and offers.
In personal finance, you are both the decision-maker and the person affected by the decision. That clean alignment of interests makes it the right place to begin — before we get to corporate finance, where the two roles split apart.
Knowing where you stand. Income, expenses, fixed vs. variable costs, the personal balance sheet, and how households around the world structure their money.
The two directions of money. Savings instruments and credit instruments, with the costs and constraints of each. The price of moving money through time.
Future value, present value, compounding, and the Rule of 72 — illustrated through Tokyo, Mumbai, Frankfurt, Lagos, and beyond. Includes a free Excel toolkit.
Why headline interest rates lie. Nominal vs. real returns, currency stability, and what the Argentine peso teaches everyone else.
Why some assets pay more than others. Risk premiums, volatility, diversification, and the link between risk and the discount rate.
The capstone. Using NPV, IRR, and payback period to decide whether a project, an investment, or any major financial decision is actually worth doing — at the right risk-adjusted discount rate.
When the decision-maker isn't the affected party. Capital structure, financial statements, valuation, M&A, bankruptcy, and the agency problem that makes corporate finance fundamentally different from personal finance. Module 01 is published; the rest are in development.
Why corporate finance is a separate subject. The role of the CFO, the principal-agent problem, fiduciary duties (care, loyalty, good faith), and the four governance mechanisms — compared across six countries.
A firm is a pool of assets producing cash flows. Those flows are paid out in a strict order of priority. Senior debt, subordinated debt, preferred equity, common equity — and the security types that compose the modern capital stack.
The three statements (income, balance sheet, cash flow) and how they connect. Accrual vs. cash accounting. Working capital, quality of earnings, and the analyst adjustments that matter. IFRS vs. US GAAP differences worth knowing.
The workhorse skill of corporate finance. Project revenues from drivers; tie through to integrated income, balance sheet, and cash flow statements. Free cash flow to firm vs. equity. Includes a free Excel toolkit.
Where the discount rate comes from in practice. Cost of equity (CAPM, dividend discount), cost of debt, and the weighted average. Why WACC estimates vary across analysts even for the same firm.
Comparable company analysis and precedent transaction analysis. EV/EBITDA, P/E, EV/Revenue, and choosing the right multiple. The trap that "multiples are easy" — they aren't.
Cash flows from Module 04 meet the discount rate from Module 05. Build the DCF: explicit projection, terminal value, enterprise vs. equity value. Sensitivity to terminal growth and WACC — the two assumptions that swing everything.
What happens when the firm can't pay. Liquidation vs. reorganization. Chapter 7 vs. 11 vs. 15 (US); UK administration; Brazilian recuperação judicial; Japanese civil rehabilitation; the German Insolvenzordnung.
Why companies merge and why most M&A destroys value. Strategic vs. financial buyers, synergies (real and imagined), deal structure, premium analysis, regulatory landscape across jurisdictions.
The decision modules. How much debt should a firm carry (M-M, trade-off, pecking order). What to do with surplus cash — dividends vs. buybacks. International variation. Includes a closing capstone exercise.
How high-uncertainty innovation gets funded — and why the rules differ from every other corner of finance. Sixteen modules across five phases, from why venture exists through the mechanics of instruments and cap tables, the investor's world, the global landscape, and the synthesis of actually raising a round. A single running example (Pipework, Inc.) threads through every module, and the international perspective is built in from the start: not US venture with footnotes, but the world's ecosystems compared.
Why venture exists and how the system looks from each seat at the table.
The problem venture solves: funding companies with no collateral, no cash flows, and a high chance of failure. The power law, asymmetric payoffs, and why banks can't do this. Nubank, Spotify, and the ecosystems that produce outliers.
The funding ladder from pre-seed to growth and the milestones that justify each round. Dilution across rounds, why companies raise in stages, and what a down round costs. Klarna's valuation round-trip as the cautionary tale.
Equity as the founder's scarcest resource. The build-vs-raise decision, the dilution-vs-control trade-off, the 7-10 year commitment, and the personal calculus of taking venture money. Why "should I raise at all?" comes first.
The full taxonomy of who funds startups: angels, accelerators, seed and multi-stage funds, corporate VC, growth, sovereign wealth, family offices, crossover funds. A worked fund-math example. Y Combinator, Sequoia, SoftBank, Saudi PIF.
The actual machinery — what investors buy, and how ownership gets divided.
What investors actually buy, and why it isn't common stock. A clause-by-clause walk through a real term sheet: liquidation preference, anti-dilution, protective provisions, board composition. Why terms can matter more than valuation.
The instruments that dominate early-stage financing. Pre- vs. post-money SAFEs, caps and discounts, the SAFE-stack dilution surprise, and convertible notes. The YC SAFE, Clearco, and the UK convertible loan note.
The most technical module. The option-pool shuffle, preference waterfalls at multiple exit values, participating preferred, and weighted-average anti-dilution — worked step by step, with the common mistakes shown and corrected along the way.
Raising without selling equity. Venture debt, revenue-based financing, and R&D tax-credit financing across the US, UK, France, and Canada. The SVB collapse and what it revealed about the venture-debt ecosystem.
Inside the fund: how the firm works, builds a portfolio, exits, and prices deals.
GPs, LPs, the 10-year fund clock, and the 2-and-20 fee structure. The endowment model that funds venture, the fee-vs-carry tension, and TVPI vs. DPI. A worked fund return from LP commitment to GP carry.
How investors build a portfolio around the power law. The fund-returner test, position sizing, reserves for follow-on, and the concentration-vs-diversification debate — Benchmark vs. Y Combinator as the two poles.
Where paper value becomes cash. IPOs and the post-2021 drought, M&A (strategic vs. financial buyers), the secondary-market explosion, and the decoupling of exit from liquidity. Klarna, Wiz/Google, and India's IPO maturation.
How valuations actually get set — closer to negotiation than calculation. The VC method, comparables with stage adjustments, Berkus and Scorecard, 409A and option pricing, and the macro-over-method lesson of the 2021-23 cycle.
The world's ecosystems compared, and where the industry is heading.
A comparative world tour through one lens: capital, talent, exits, regulation. The US, Europe, Israel's military-tech pipeline, India's digital public infrastructure, China's decoupling, and the emerging ecosystems of Latin America, SE Asia, Africa, and MENA.
The forward-looking module, framed as forces and open questions. The AI reshaping, the liquidity revolution, capital superabundance, geographic rebalancing, new fund structures, the honest contrarian critiques — and what stays durable.
Taught last, because running a raise well requires everything above.
Raising as a structured sales process, not an event. Preparation, the investor funnel, running conversations in parallel to create a competitive dynamic, the term-sheet stage, diligence and close, and the common failure modes that derail raises.
The bilateral capstone. Every element of the pitch shown from both sides — how the founder crafts it and what the investor reads from it. The deck structure, the narrative, the metrics, the team, the ask, and the meeting itself. Closes the whole track.
The classic, status-quo half of the Banking pair. It builds the conventional bank from the human need it serves — somewhere safe to keep money and a way to pay — and follows that need through the machinery, the fragility, and the government bargain that contains it, ending honestly on the problems traditional banking leaves unsolved. Those residual problems are the starting premise of the companion track, Innovation in Banking. International from the first module: not one country's banking with footnotes, but the US, Germany, Japan, Kenya, India, and the EU compared throughout.
What a demand deposit is, how banks actually work, and the uncomfortable truth about what your money becomes.
Start with the need, not the institution. Safekeeping, payment, liquidity on demand, and the demand deposit that bundles them. Four countries, four very different institutions meeting the same need — US banks, German Sparkassen, Japan Post, Kenya's M-Pesa.
A bank is a balance sheet. Deposits as liabilities, loans as assets, reserves and the reserve ratio, the money multiplier vs. the modern "loans create deposits" view, maturity transformation, the spread, and the thin sliver of capital.
The conceptual core. Holding digital money makes you an unsecured creditor of a leveraged lender; banks lend though deposit-taking doesn't require it; the web of interbank credit; and why there's no risk-free digital money for the public — the gap narrow banks and CBDCs aim to fill.
Why the structure breaks, the safety net built to contain it, and the wall that net raises around the industry.
Illiquidity vs. insolvency, the anatomy of a run, why running is rational (Diamond-Dybvig), how fire sales turn one into the other, and the recurring history of panics from 1907 to the 1930s to 2008 to Silicon Valley Bank in 2023 — at digital speed.
The three pillars, each aimed at a specific failure mode. How deposit insurance is funded and capped, Bagehot's rule and the lender of last resort, the hard problem of illiquid-vs-insolvent, moral hazard and too-big-to-fail, and the Basel capital and liquidity rules.
Why banking is one of the hardest industries to enter. The charter, the central-bank master account (and the narrow bank that couldn't get one), deposit insurance as a barrier, the rent-a-bank workaround and its fragility — and an even-handed weighing of why the moat exists against the case that it's higher than safety requires.
Where the system strains hardest — across borders and at the margins — and the synthesis that hands off to the innovation track.
Why there's no global central bank, the nostro/vostro correspondent system, what SWIFT actually does (move messages, not money), why cross-border is slow and costly, de-risking cutting off whole regions, and the proof from SEPA that the friction is a fixable choice.
The unbanked and underbanked, why the branch-and-credit model excludes, the specific barriers, the poverty premium, exclusion in rich countries (US vs. the EU's basic-account right), and the developing-world leapfrog — African mobile money and India's JAM stack.
The closer and the seam. Every residual problem the track surfaced, reduced to three root causes — money fused with credit, trust gated by the state, and a model that excludes — and a map of the innovations (of every type, not just tech) that the companion track takes up.
This classic track ends on the residual problems; the companion Innovation in Banking track begins on them — exploring narrow banks, central-bank digital currency, neobanks, open banking, mobile money, Bitcoin and self-custody, stablecoins, and participatory banking, the new issues they raise, and the people driving the change. Now complete.
View the innovation track ↓The innovation half of the Banking pair. It opens exactly where the classic track ends — on the residual problems traditional banking leaves unsolved — and follows the rest of the five-beat arc: the innovations answering those problems worldwide, the new issues they raise, and the solutions and innovators shaping what comes next. Its central thesis: innovation is not just technology. The most powerful answers to banking's deepest problems are often structural, legal, regulatory, and organizational — and they came, disproportionately, from the periphery.
Picking up the residual problems, then attacking the fusion of money and credit from the money side.
The premise. The six residual problems reduced to three root causes, the typology of innovation (structural, legal, regulatory, organizational, technological — not just tech), innovation from the periphery, and the trade-off stance the track takes.
The structural answer to the fusion: a bank that takes deposits and makes no loans. The Chicago Plan, fully-reserved stablecoins as narrow banks in disguise, the disintermediation trade-off, and Switzerland's Vollgeld vote.
The public version of the narrow bank. Retail vs wholesale, the design choices that decide everything, the global state of play, and the three hard issues — disintermediation, privacy, and programmability.
Attacking the gated near-oligopoly by product and by rule, and the excluding delivery model head-on.
The private assault on the moat. The branchless app-first bank, the rent-a-charter banking-as-a-service model, the interchange economics, the UK-vs-US contrast, and the Synapse fragility.
The purest regulatory innovation: forcing banks to share data and payment access. Screen-scraping, the two functions, the global mandates, and the competition-versus-concentration debate.
The organizational triumph over exclusion. M-Pesa, the agent network, the float and its narrow-bank link, the super-app contrast, and the concentration and consumer-protection issues.
The most radical custody model, the technological and legal frontiers, then the issues raised and the close of the whole pair.
The most radical innovation: the one model that eliminates the deposit relationship entirely. Money as a claim on no one, held in self-custody with no intermediary; permissionless and censorship-resistant; the heavy burdens that are the flip side; and the irony that most people re-trust an exchange (FTX).
The technological assault on cross-border friction — and the answer to Bitcoin's volatility. The shared global ledger, stablecoins as narrow banks without a safety net, how they break (Terra, the USDC depeg), digital dollarization, and the contest with CBDC bridges.
The legal/structural innovation attacking the fusion from the contract side. Risk-sharing instead of fixed debt, the instruments, profit-sharing accounts, the cooperative tradition, and the form-versus-substance debate.
The reckoning. The four cross-cutting issues that run across every innovation, and the pattern underneath: each shifts who holds the data, who bears the risk, and who holds the power — making governance the deepest question.
The capstone of the whole pair. Governing the issues, the broad cast of innovators (including the public sector), what endures versus hype, the comparative verdict, and the synthesis — money as trust, continually rebuilt by choice.
This innovation track begins on the residual problems that the classic Banking track ends on. Start there if you want the full arc from the ground up — why banking exists, how it works, and the problems these innovations set out to solve. Together the two tracks form one complete treatment of the banking sector.
The first technology track — a new kind of track about the technical machinery much of innovative finance runs on, rather than its institutions. This one covers all the cryptography touching finance, taught conceptually with intuition and analogy and no mathematics. It frames every cryptographic tool by the trust problem it solves, and builds toward two concrete payoffs: understanding, technically, how a card payment is secured, and how Bitcoin actually works under the hood — the very machinery the banking innovation track deferred to "the crypto track."
The small set of mathematical building blocks, introduced one at a time in the order they build on each other.
The frame for the whole track: cryptography creates trust, secrecy, and proof without a trusted party. The three jobs — confidentiality, integrity, authenticity — why finance is its biggest customer, and the shift from physical trust (seals, signatures, vaults) to mathematical trust.
The first and simplest primitive, now fully interactive: a one-way function that produces a unique fingerprint of any data. Play with a live SHA-256, watch the avalanche effect fire on one keystroke, and tamper with a working blockchain. Why this humble tool underpins passwords, signatures, and blockchains.
Scrambling with a shared key, now interactive: encrypt and decrypt in a live lockbox, watch a wrong key turn the message to noise, and trace the key-distribution problem that motivates everything to follow. The workhorse securing data at rest and in transit.
The conceptual leap at the heart of the track, now interactive: a public lock anyone can use and a private key only you hold. Follow a tiny RSA with real numbers, then type into a working public-key system and watch the wrong key fail. It solves key distribution and underpins both card security and Bitcoin.
Public-key crypto run backward, now interactive: sign a message with the private key, verify with the public key, then tamper with it and watch the signature break. Authenticity, integrity, and non-repudiation — the mechanism that authorizes a Bitcoin spend and validates a software update.
The mostly-invisible cryptography that protects the trillions flowing through cards and online transactions every day.
Now interactive: verify a real certificate the way a browser does, tamper with it and watch it break, and trace the chain of trust. Certificate authorities, TLS/HTTPS securing every online transaction, the four primitives in one handshake, and what happens when a CA is compromised.
Now interactive: tap a simulated chip and watch each transaction make a different unforgeable code, then try to replay a stolen one and fail. Dynamic authentication, tokenization (why your phone never sends your real card number), the PIN, and the hardware vaults guarding the keys behind everyday money.
Exactly what the banking innovation track deferred — building Bitcoin up from keys to the blockchain to consensus, then beyond.
Now interactive: generate a real key pair, watch an address derive from it, then sign a transaction to spend with no bank — and watch an attacker fail to spend your coins. How a wallet holds keys not coins, what seed phrases really are, and the unforgiving reality behind "be your own bank."
Now interactive: tamper with a working chain of real transactions and watch it shatter downstream, then try to spend a coin twice and watch the ledger refuse. Blocks, hash-linking, Merkle trees, replication, and what "immutable" really means — the data structure beneath all of cryptocurrency.
Now interactive: run a real miner in your browser, grinding nonces to find a hash with enough leading zeros, and watch the work multiply with difficulty. Proof-of-work and mining, the longest-chain rule, the 51% attack, the energy debate, and proof-of-stake. How a leaderless network agrees with no one in charge.
Now interactive: run a crowdfunding contract that pays out or refunds entirely on its own, then deploy a buggy vault, watch an attacker drain it, and discover you can't patch it. From a ledger of balances to one that runs code — DeFi, "code is law," and why immutability cuts both ways.
Two forward-looking topics with real and growing stakes for finance.
Technology tracks are a distinct type — not paired classic-and-innovation like the sector tracks, but foundational and cross-cutting, covering the technical machinery all of finance runs on. Cryptography is the first. It underpins the Bitcoin, stablecoin, and CBDC material across the innovation tracks, which is why those modules pointed here for the technical depth.
How do ordinary people get the money they need to buy what they need? This single integrated track covers every answer the world has found — not just credit, but the full set of ways a household funds itself — treated as a continuum of competing answers to the same hard problems rather than a tidy old-versus-new split. It runs heavily on international comparison, from informal savings clubs to algorithmic micro-lending, and keeps one insight at its center: unlike a company, a person cannot sell equity in themselves, so consumers live in a debt-only world. The same honest stance as the other tracks — asking of each method what need it meets, for whom, at what cost, and whether it leaves people better off.
Why funding consumers is so hard — the frame the whole track is built on.
How households have funded themselves for centuries — and still do, across most of the world.
How most of humanity has always funded itself, long before banks: family and community lending, the moneylender, rotating savings clubs (chit funds, susu, stokvels, tandas, hui), pawnbroking and gold loans, and saving-to-buy. The one idea that makes it all work — social collateral, the seed of microfinance — its many forms across a dozen countries, and what it cannot do.
The formal system's entry: how banks lend to strangers by manufacturing trust from documents, contracts, and courts — and lean on collateral, the master tool that makes loans cheaper, larger, and longer. Unsecured credit, the mortgage and its striking global variations, auto loans, and the member-owned cooperatives that smuggled the village's social collateral back into formal finance — and what collateral still can't reach.
Buying now and paying over time, treated as a funding instrument (payment mechanics belong to the Payments track): hire-purchase from the 1850s sewing machine, the installment-versus-revolving distinction, the card as mass unsecured revolving credit, the minimum-payment trap, and why the same plastic builds wealth in one country and debt in another — Brazil's interest-free parcelas, the US revolving nation, German and Japanese pay-in-full.
The risk-modeling problem at the heart of the difficulty — and the great innovations that attack it.
Who do you lend to? Credit history, the bureau and credit-score system (FICO and its global variants), the chicken-and-egg of thin files, the unbanked, adverse selection, and moral hazard — and how countries with deep bureaus differ from those with none. The pivot from tradition to innovation.
The great innovation for the collateral-less poor: Grameen and BRAC in Bangladesh, joint-liability group lending that turns social ties into collateral, the global spread, and the honest disillusionment — modest measured effects, commercialization, and the Andhra Pradesh crisis.
Alternative data and machine learning: mobile-phone and transaction data, instant smartphone microloans — M-Shwari in Kenya, Tala and Branch, Ant and Sesame in China, ML lenders in the US — extending credit to thin files, and the new risks of opacity, bias, surveillance, and over-lending.
The latest reinventions of consumer funding — and the special case that tests the equity problem.
Buy Now Pay Later (Klarna, Afterpay, Affirm), peer-to-peer and marketplace lending, neobank lending (Nubank), earned-wage access, and embedded lending — the unbundling and rebundling of consumer credit, and the regulatory responses chasing it across countries.
The equity problem made vivid: student loans as investment in oneself, government versus private models, the US student-debt story, income-contingent repayment (HECS-style debt that behaves a little like equity), and income-share agreements as the explicit quasi-equity experiment — and why funding human capital is uniquely hard.
The dark side, the role of the state, and pulling the whole picture together.
Payday and title loans, overdraft fees, rent-to-own: the debt-trap mechanics, whether high rates are justified by risk and cost or are exploitation, over-indebtedness crises across countries, and the behavioral forces (present bias) the fringe exploits. The access-versus-protection tension at its sharpest.
Usury caps and their unintended consequences, truth-in-lending and APR disclosure, debt-collection rules, and bankruptcy regimes — and the great substitute for credit, the welfare state and social transfers, which mean people in different countries need very different amounts of debt. Islamic interest-free models as another architecture entirely.
Pulling it together: the spectrum from informal to algorithmic, the universal tensions (access versus protection, risk versus inclusion, debt versus the missing equity option), how different countries strike the balance, the state of financial inclusion, and where consumer funding is heading. The forward-looking close.
Most finance education comes from one of two unhappy places: textbook abstraction that never touches a real wallet, or American-centric advice that breaks the moment you cross a border. Globefin's central commitment is the alternative: finance taught comparatively, with the world built in from the start rather than added as a footnote.
Inflation isn't explained only with US consumer prices — it's explained with hyperinflation history in Brazil, with deflation in Japan, with eurozone harmonized indices. Pensions aren't explained only with 401(k)s — they're explained alongside Germany's pay-as-you-go system, France's PER, and the absence of formal pensions in most emerging economies. Every module pairs the universal principle with at least two specific national instances.
The point isn't tourism. It's that comparison is how you learn which features of a system are universal (the time value of money applies everywhere) and which are local choices that could have been made differently (shareholder primacy vs codetermination; debtor-in-possession vs administrator-led bankruptcy). Students who learn finance in only one country mistake their country's conventions for laws of nature.
The graduates of this approach are useful in cross-border settings — which is where most senior finance careers eventually land — and recognize the design choices that built their home system, instead of taking them for granted.
Module 01 takes about 25 minutes. By the end, you will have built your own cash-flow statement and balance sheet — in any currency.
Start Module 01 →