The Fintech Program provided me with solid knowledge and mental frames regarding the State of the Art of the technological disruption of the financial markets, covering a wide range of contents – namely, from the regulation to the Artificial Intelligence, including cryptocurrencies and Blockchain. With this program of excellence, I became a more aware as a professional, to understand the latest technological advancements in themes as diverse as the collaborative financing or payment systems, either regarding their technological specificities or their regulatory challenges.

The Fintech Disruption Program is a way to get to know a little bit better the opportunities that await us in the near future. It is disruptive, innovative, challenging, intensive, fertile in new concepts, captivating and rich in contents that, although they are already being used worldwide, very few people are currently able to explain. The Faculty at Universidade Católica is one of the differentiating factors of this program, as they present themselves as being part of the rare people that have accumulated adequate experience in an area, which is still in its early steps, providing them with a high degree of confidence in teaching these contents. It is also important to highlight the great organization and structure of the program, as the theoretical concepts are addressed together with real life cases, and the invited speakers are Fintech professionals, who give their testimonials first-hand. This provides an extra degree of interest and up-to-dateness to the contents. The program also has a key factor which is networking, allowing participants to explore their professional contact networks.

The first edition of the Fintech Disruption Program brought to the education agenda an innovative and wide sector in a fast growing stage, that will lead, in a short term, to a disruption in all knowledge and activity areas. In that extent, the program gave me a relevant insight about the essence of this massive movement, which is focused in the credit, insuring and finance industries, and allowed me to acknowledge about its effects, and consequently to adopt a more suitable positioning in order to face that new reality that is arriving to our lives.

Fintech has helped solve several specific problems that have become challenging for banks. They have the agility to focus on the product that satisfies specific and rapidly changing needs. The Banks, on the other hand, have scalability, brand and distribution. With what I have learnt in the Fintech Disruption Program, I can conclude that the collaboration among these two entities may result in a magical combination.

The social and economic changes of recent years, as well as the arising of new business models and technologies are, simultaneously, threats and opportunities for the banking, insurance and assets management businesses.
With that in mind, the CATÓLICA-LISBON Fintech Disruption Program presented itself as a great opportunity to strengthen my skills in those areas, and to make me able to prepare in a more strong and qualified way the “future that has already begun”.