The Center for Digital Finance and Technologies within the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Columbia University aims at designing cutting-edge AI algorithms for financial products and servicing and understanding the promises of emerging financial innovation. Advances in fabrication and technology combined with the integration of alternative and unstructured data into AI and data science algorithms have opened the door for transformative research in the area of financial services. It is now time to leverage the efforts and design AI analytics for assessing creditworthiness, fraud detection, crisis management, and situational awareness.
Of equal importance is to mitigate bottlenecks in efficiency, accessibility, and transparency of the existing financial system. Households and businesses do not have cheap financing options, transferring cash or other securities remains costly, and trading assets is expensive. Accessibility to financial services is limited, and a non-negligible fraction of the world population remains unbanked. Fintech innovations are not yet understood, and require answering fundamental questions such as: Is blockchain technology ready to support algorithmic investment and fast payment systems? How should Fintech companies, decentralized finance, and tokenomics, be regulated?
The Center leverages multi-disciplinary expertise at Columbia in diverse domains such as computer science, engineering, data science, finance, and economics, to answer these fundamental questions