The Finesse Portfolio Management Facility

Finance courses have experienced a rapid growth in student numbers over the last decade. Several new finance degrees have been launched in recent years including the Bachelor of Finance at the University of Dundee and the Bachelor of Finance at Manchester; more are planned in the near future (such as the Bachelor of Finance at Aberdeen). Lecturers who run these courses are now faced with a problem common to many disciplines how to maintain and enhance educational standards for a growing student population within the constraints of strictly limited resources. Suitably qualified staff are difficult to find given the high opportunity cost of the large salaries on offer from financial institutions. In addition, realistic data for teaching purposes are difficult to employ because of the costs of obtaining such data from industry and the lack of appropriate tools for students to analysis this information; financial institutions are not keen to provide cheap copies of their computer software because this provision may diminish any competitive advantage which this software supplies. The project team believe that graduates entering the world of finance would benefit from experience of important financial software used by industry and sought to offer this experience to them.