Online Finance 2025-2026

Expand your knowledge and understanding of the banking industry.

This course provides key insights essential to an understanding of the modern banking industry. Key topics include, financial statements, bank activities, the different types of banks, management of banks, bank assets and liabilities management, bank specific issues and evolution of the banking sector.

Expand your knowledge of financial technology (Fintech) and Big Data through gaining knowledge and understanding of recent advances and transformational changes that are taking place in many areas of the finance industry.

This course will give you an understanding of advancements in technology, from blockchain to mobile access internet and machine learning. You will have the opportunity to learn how these new innovations are leading to improved decision making and increased efficiency through insights generated from data.

Economics is subject within social sciences whose objective is to study how to allocate scarce resources, such as oil fields, bread, cars, haircuts, and financial capital. If there was an unlimited amount of resources, then economics would not be needed. Among other things, financial assets are scarce resources as well. That is one of the reasons why finance is relevant to economics. Conversely, economics is relevant to finance as it enables us to better understand how financial markets function. The objective of this course is to provide you with a sound understanding of the main economic theories and to demonstrate their relevance to finance.

In this course we will study basic derivatives contracts: forwards, futures, options and swaps, written on a variety of underlying instruments. We will also investigate interest rate and credit derivatives that will introduce you to a broader world of more complex derivatives products. This course will provide you with an introduction to essential areas in derivatives from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. The theoretical aspect will cover the pricing mechanism of forwards, options and swaps, the construction of Binomial tree model as well as the underpinnings of the Black-Scholes model. The practical aspect will focus on the derivatives trading, the organisation and structure of derivatives markets and hedging with derivatives as well as their role is risk management. The course will equip you with rigorous analytical skills in order to be able to conduct a broad quantitative analysis in the area of derivatives with the use of Excel spreadsheets.

International finance is concerned with monetary and macroeconomic interrelations between countries within the dynamics of global international trade. Financial institutions that are central to developments in research about international finance include organisations such as: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the intergovernmental organisation for economic and co-operational development (OECD). Understanding international finance has two strands. First, from a macroeconomic perspective international finance is a branch of financial economics that considers international monetary systems and concepts such as the balance of payments. This strand is also concerned with foreign exchange rates and exchange parity relations such as interest rate parity and purchasing power parity. In the second strand of international finance, our focus lies with issues and risks facing the financial management of multinational corporations. Our discussion within this strand  begins with international bond markets. In recent years the international bond market has grown to an amount outstanding that is greater than $100 trillion. Hence, we focus on this market principally because, within a globalised trading market, bond markets represent important sources of funds and financing to companies outside their operating headquarters. Equity markets are, of course, important sources of funding also and we put in context the balance between equity and debt from an international perspective.  Our overarching course objective is to enhance critical reasoning skills in finance through the study of international financial models and international financial management. We look forward to exploring this very exciting topic with you during this course.

Becoming a Certified Financial Analyst charterholder is the aspiration of every finance industry professional. This course covers the CFA syllabus in partnership with Fitch Learning. You will engage with a sequence of learning materials and will have access to a dedicated tutor who will support you week to week and prepare you for the CFA level 1 exam. You will also reflect on professional and academic approaches to finance.

This course examines asset pricing and portfolio management within a modern practical context.  The heart of modern portfolio theory is development of the relationship between expected return and risk. We analyse this central concept using an active learning approach to portfolio optimisation. This is where you build and estimate a portfolio optimisation model in Excel. Thereafter, we compare portfolio weights where different asset pricing models are used to estimate expected returns. During the course consideration is also given to performance measurements such as the Sharpe ratio and Jensen’s alpha. At the heart of our discussion is fulfillment of the objectives, given the constraints of the investor (client) who may be an individual or an institution (such as an endowment or pension fund). Following the ethics provided by the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Institute our aim is to embed contemporary developments in asset pricing within the context of the professional investment arena and the portfolio manager.