05 Aug 2021

Nowadays Universities and Fintech industry collaborations are on the rise. Partnerships in business and the academic community are becoming increasingly popular. Conditions of remote work during a pandemic stimulate the exchange of ideas, cultures, innovations, resources, approaches in all spheres of society.

Obviously, the core interest of both differs. When they collaborate, each party has certain expectations from the other side – the firms expect innovative approaches to secure high quality education, timesaving for the industry analysis, valuable knowledge and groundbreaking methodologies, while the universities expect their students to be given business experience through internships and opportunities to put their skills into practice.

The academics also expect to be given the opportunity to transfer theoretical ideas into practical projects and to implement research in the real world. Both parties have fundamental points of interest and this is where a win-win situation is achieved for both of them.

There are three win-win situations for an academically-oriented consulting company:

• firstly, having selected professors as competence partners in their closer network, the consulting company can benefit from knowledge transfer, research results and new methodologies, giving them at the end a competitive advantage;
• secondly, the university benefits from this type of collaboration since the output of cooperative projects boosts the amount of practical expertise and experience which professors can draw on for their lectures. Strong business experience is exactly what modern students expect;
• thirdly, cultural integration will gain new benefits for both sides. The academic culture encourages openness; researchers are motivated to share and publish new findings. In contrast, corporate culture is more guarded; they need to monetize their innovations. Cultures are rapidly changing for both universities and companies, and corporate culture is embracing openness more and more. And, universities are realizing they need a way to make their findings more socially relevant.

International experience shows the effectiveness of such cooperation, in particular in the field of fintech consulting. For example, the University of Edinburgh wants to see business partners and together they can stimulate innovation through research for a brighter fintech future. This University have four collaborators in Fintech area – Natwest Group, Franklin Templeton, Predictiva and DirectID. They have worked closely with the university through academic research, sponsoring post-graduate students and compiling resources for symbiotic advantages.

Banks for Institutions, as a consulting company with an operational office in Lviv (Ukraine), also have realized such kind of collaboration with academics and students of Banking University in the Fintech sphere by conducting researches of the fintech (payment market) industry opportunities on a global scale.