E7FinTech

Module-11-Challenge

You’re a growth analyst at MercadoLibre. With over 200 million users, MercadoLibre is the most popular e-commerce site in Latin America. You've been tasked with analyzing the company's financial and user data in clever ways to help the company grow. So, you want to find out if the ability to predict search traffic can translate into the ability to successfully trade the stock.

Module-13-Challenge

Background You work as a risk management associate at Alphabet Soup, a fictitious venture capital firm. The Alphabet Soup business team receives many funding applications from startups every day. This team has asked you to help them create a model that predicts whether applicants will become successful if funded by Alphabet Soup.

Module-20-Challenge

A fintech startup company has recently hired you. This company is disrupting the finance industry with its own cross-border, Ethereum-compatible blockchain that connects financial institutions. Currently, the team is building smart contracts to automate many of the institutions’ financial processes and features.

Module-5-Challenge

You’ve decided to start a fintech consulting firm that focuses on projects to benefit local communities. You just won your first contract with a large credit union. The project entails building a tool to help credit union members evaluate their financial health. Specifically, the credit union board wants the members to be able to do two things. First, they should be able to assess their monthly budgets. Second, they should be able to forecast a reasonably effective retirement plan based on their current holdings of cryptocurrencies, stocks, and bonds. The chief technology officer (CTO) of the credit union wants you to develop a prototype application to present at its next assembly.

Module-6-Challenge

Proptech, the application of technology to real-estate markets, is an innovative domain in the fintech industry. Assume that you’re an analyst at a proptech company that wants to offer an instant, one-click service for people to buy properties and then rent them. The company wants to have a trial of this offering in the San Francisco real-estate market. If the service proves popular, they can then expand to other markets. Your job is to use your data visualization skills, including aggregation, interactive visualizations, and geospatial analysis, to find properties in the San Francisco market that are viable investment opportunities.

Module-1-Challenge

In this Challenge, you will: Select a Fintech domain that interests you, and then choose a company or project within that domain. Research the domain and company. Write a detailed case study of the company. Upload your case study to your git repository. This assignment will challenge you to polish your fintech research skills by accessing reports, publications, and online resources that fintech professionals use to evaluate the industry. It will also help you situate the techniques and technologies that you will use in this course––for example, machine learning, Python, modeling, and blockchain––within the real world of global fintech. Finally, it will give you practice presenting and speaking about fintech strategy and technology.

Module-10-Challenge

You’ll assume the role of an advisor in one of the top five financial advisory firms in the world. Competitors are fierce, so you want to propose a novel approach to assembling investment portfolios that are based on cryptocurrencies. Instead of basing your proposal on only returns and volatility, you want to include other factors that might impact the crypto market—leading to better performance for your portfolio. When you present the idea, your manager loves it! So, you’re asked to create a prototype for submitting your crypto portfolio proposal to the company board of directors.

Module-12-Challenge

Credit risk poses a classification problem that’s inherently imbalanced. The reason is that healthy loans easily outnumber risky loans. For this Challenge, you’ll use various techniques to train and evaluate models with imbalanced classes. You’ll use a dataset of historical lending activity from a peer-to-peer lending services company to build a model that can identify the creditworthiness of borrowers.

Module-14-Challenge

For this Challenge, you’ll assume the role of a financial advisor at one of the top five financial advisory firms in the world. Your firm constantly competes with the other major firms to manage and automatically trade assets in a highly dynamic environment. In recent years, your firm has heavily profited by using computer algorithms that can buy and sell faster than human traders.

Module-18-Challenge

You’re a fintech engineer who’s working at one of the five largest banks in the world. You were recently promoted to act as the lead developer on their decentralized finance team. Your task is to build a blockchain-based ledger system, complete with a user-friendly web interface. This ledger will allow partner banks to conduct transactions.

Module-19-Challenge

You work at a startup that’s building a new and disruptive application named KryptoJobs2Go (a fictitious application). Your customers can use KryptoJobs2Go to find fintech professionals from a list of candidates, hire them, and then pay them. As the lead developer, you’ve been tasked with integrating the Ethereum blockchain network.

Module-2-Challenge

In this assignment, you'll apply the concepts you've learned to complete the required PyBank Python activity and, if you wish to stretch your skills even further, the optional PyRamen Python activity. Both activities present a real-world situation in which your newfound Python skills will come in handy.

Module-21-Challenge

After waiting for years and passing several tests, the Martian Aerospace Agency selected you to become part of the first human colony on Mars. As a prominent fintech professional, they chose you to lead a project developing a monetary system for the new Mars colony. You decided to base this new system on blockchain technology.

Module-4-Challenge

You have been investing in algorithmic trading strategies. Some of the investment managers love them, some hate them, but they all think their way is best. You just learned these quantitative analysis techniques with Python and Pandas, and you want to determine which portfolio is performing the best across multiple areas: volatility, returns, risk, and Sharpe ratios.

Module-7-Challenge

Fraud is prevalent these days, whether you are a small taco shop or a large international business. While there are emerging technologies that employ machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect fraud, many instances of fraud detection still require strong data analytics to find abnormal charges. In this homework assignment, you will apply your new SQL skills to analyze historical credit card transactions and consumption patterns in order to identify possible fraudulent transactions.

Project-3