Designing the Fintech 101 Syllabus
A framework for building our careers based on conversations with the Georgia Fintech Academy co-founders Dr. Art Recesso & Dr. Jim Senn
1Today, I had my first piece published in print. AI is reshaping fintech jobs. Georgia is building the talent to match. is a look at how AI has disrupted traditional fintech talent pipelines and the ways we can address it. Programs like the Georgia Fintech Academy are reshaping the way we train talent through dynamic curriculum, experiential learning, and rapid industry feedback.
Along the way, I had the chance to talk to many interesting people, including the co-founders of the Georgia Fintech Academy: Dr. Art Recesso and Dr. Jim Senn. Their input and insights were invaluable for getting the “real story” of how this thing came to be.
That’s what this post will focus on: why it was needed and how it was designed. In a sea of disruption, this story is a glimpse at how to keep our own heads above water.
An Urgent Request
What skills do people need to have to succeed in fintech? Ask 10 experts and you’ll get 11 answers. That was the challenge facing Mark Lytle, Art Recesso, and Jim Senn in 2015 when asked to begin a fintech talent analysis. The answer was important to get right. Industry estimates showed Georgia needed 5,000 more fintech professionals by 2020 — a 14% increase.
Meeting this need meant determining what roles were needed today and what roles would be needed in the future. The team also needed to understand what skills these roles required and how to shape a curriculum around it. The team led by Recesso and Senn set off on an epic fact finding spree.
The team started by conducting extensive interviews with more than 50 companies. These included major fintechs in Atlanta like Equifax, Fiserv, Cardlytics, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). They discussed how the companies operated today, what roles (not titles) were needed, and where companies thought the industry was heading.
Mapping the Skills Gap
By 2018, Recesso, Senn, and team determined the five functions with the highest demand:
Software Development: Everything from core banking and processing systems to mobile technology and web development.
Cybersecurity: Protecting systems from both the offensive and defensive side. Also includes fraud and bad-actor identification.
Client Services and Business Development: All the ways to support the customer. Includes everything from the call center to the sell side of the companies.
Data Science: In many cases means analytics, but also includes how data and insights are extracted from and embedded into product development and, ultimately, the product.
Innovation: Creating new products, new processes, and new business models to meet the evolving needs of the industry and its clients.
These functions covered the core operations of the business (software development, client services, and business development), the enabling functions (cyber security and data science), and the future of the industry (innovation and product development).2 Recesso and Senn found that despite the variety, each functions relied on common traits.
The first was understanding how the financial ecosystem operates (i.e. banks, regulators, payment methods). Schools and other education platforms play a key role in teaching these fundamentals so that employers don’t have to spend 2-6 weeks getting new talent up to speed. Additionally, some segments like banking and investing required deep regulatory knowledge while payments and identity leaned heavily on understanding technology and hidden systems.
Recesso and Senn published their findings in 2018 which laid out the base for the Georgia Fintech Academy. They determined that in order to succeed, students needed to understand three key topics: the financial ecosystem, the banking industry, and current and emerging technology.
Knowing what to teach was only the first hurdle to overcome. Knowing how to teach these topics and how to keep curriculum up to date was, and still is, the secret to the Georgia Fintech Academy.
Experiential Learning & Feedback Loops
Recesso and Senn knew that the transition from course work to real work was not always smooth. The things learned in textbooks were out of date or too generalized to be valuable. To bridge these gaps, the Academy was built around internships and apprenticeships.
Real work experience and industry-funded studies benefitted all those involved. Students were able to get out of the classroom and gain real-world experience. These experiences made coursework tangible while also exposing them to the broader industry. This last point was particularly important, as Recesso explained, “more than 40,000 Georgians work in fintech, but most students don’t know that the industry exists.”
Employers equally benefited as they got real work accomplished and reinforced critically needed talent pipelines. Lastly, the Academy benefitted from the direct industry feedback and from insights the students provided. This feedback loop from employer to classroom has kept the curriculum fresh while helping more than 10,000 students since 2018. A selection of current courses can be found on the USG emajor website and include Foundations of Fintech, Cybersecurity for Fintech, and Financial Technologies and Services.
How to Map Our Careers
Recesso and Senn’s approach to building the Georgia Fintech Academy isn’t limited to universities. All of us can use their process to learn new skills, develop talent programs within our organizations, and shape our careers.
Step 1: Define the Market Need
Talk to a wide range of people to understand the state of the market. Conversations with friends, colleagues, mentors, and industry leaders are a great place to start — you’d be surprised who’s willing to offer insights! Another source is to look at job postings to see what skills/roles are trending and in-demand. At the end of it, you should be able to answer: What roles are emerging vs. declining?
Step 2: Identify Core Functions
Based on the conversations and research, group the roles/skills into three categories:
Core Operations: Baseline knowledge and skills required for your current role
Enabling Functions: Experiences that strengthen and expand your craft
Emerging Opportunities: Areas of work that are actively seeing disruption or where disruption is most likely
Grouping these allows you to assess what’s really important for near- and long-term success.
Step 3: Distill the Common Traits
With the need and core functions identified, your task is finding the common skill sets and knowledge that spans the functions. This includes understanding the ecosystem, technical, and market context — whether at an industry, company, or team level. Look for transferrable frameworks that can work across multiple functions. Your ultimate goal is to answer: what skills can be switched across functions to avoid having to start over?
Step 4: Build the Learning Path
Identifying market, functions, and skills is a challenge, but like Recesso and Senn understood, it’s only a halfway mark. Creating a path for skill and knowledge development will vary based on your situation, but the methods can be distilled into three groups:
Formal Education: Online courses, education sessions, certifications, or degree programs provide an excellent factual base.
Experiential Learning: “Stretch projects”, side hustles, rotational programs, internships, and externships build the contextual framework for the formal, factual knowledge.
Feedback Loops: Mentorships (formal or informal), peer review sessions, and networking can correct misunderstandings and ensure your fact base and experiential framework are ready for the world ahead.
Put more simply: learn → apply → reflect → update
Thank you to everyone who helped me learn more about learning. A special debt is owed to Georgia Fintech Academy Co-Founders, Art Recesso and Jim Senn. Art has been an incredible teacher for me as I’ve learned about building curriculum. Jim is a godfather of Georgia fintech and experience and is truly a treasure trove of insights.
Additional resources:
The learning framework from the MIT Work of the Future Working Paper by Prof. Michael J. Handel
Disclaimer: I am an employee of Global Payments. The posts (or views) on this site are my own and do not reflect the positions, strategies or opinions of Global Payments Inc. The views of anyone quoted do not necessarily reflect the views of their organizations.
The individual skills needed for these roles varied widely. To build the academic curriculum and associated learning outcomes statements, the team relied on their interview notes, academic research, and the O*NET skills database produced by the U.S. Department of Labor. O*NET contains over 19,500 “task statements” linked to nearly 1,000 occupations. They also had access to a database produced by Burning Glass that identified and extracted over 16,000 skill keywords from its corpus of online job postings.