In this episode, we talk to Todd Feldman, professor at San Francisco State University. We discuss a number of Fintech endeavors, including how Fintech works in the villages of Malawi, how cryptocurrency works, and the benefits and risks of investing in digital coins.

Todd also shares the challenges of incorporating new and practical curriculum at universities and why it should be redesigned to better equip the students for a rapidly changing financial world.

Todd also serves as the FinTech Initiative's Director. He is also a member of the SFSU endowment committee and advisor to the student investment fund.

Todd holds a Ph.D. in International Finance and Economics from UC Santa Cruz and, under the direction of Dan Friedman, is one of the pioneers of experimental economics.

[00:03:49] A lot is going on in Africa, especially with mobile payments. We've toured different projects in Malawi, one of the projects we went to visit and learned in-depth as we followed people around. So it was a women's initiative, essentially the women in the village created their own little bank, little savings, and loan operation. They're able to collect a certain amount of money and loan that money out to people in their village. Through that cooperative of the women, they were able to then afford to pay the school fees for their children and kind of live off the money from just doing that. 

Because of the village and everyone knows each other, the default rate was pretty low, so they never went outside the village, always inside the village. And that was pretty amazing just to watch the women. Unfortunately, the men who were fishing, it was their main occupation, essentially would spend their money on alcohol. And so the women had to take care of the children and then they formed this savings and loan operation and were able to pay for other children to go to school. 

[00:20:51] It takes a lot of effort to create a course. And once it's created there's little incentive to update it or to change it, and this happens at a lot of universities and therefore a lot of curriculum just gets stale. And that can be okay if the world doesn't change too much. But now we're in this pivotal point of the world-changing dramatically and therefore, teaching the old curriculum would not be fair to students. I think we have to provide students with the skill sets and kind of knowledge to be successful in their careers. It is a good time to warrant an overview of our curriculum. I see a lot of students wanting more practical classes, how to do financial planning, and how to navigate cryptocurrency investing.

• LinkedIn