South Korea Commits $16M to Training Future Digital Finance Experts

The Korean financial services commission and the Seoul metropolitan government have announced plans to invest $16 million in training digital finance experts for four years on Feb. 12. The application period to win the grant is March 4-6.

Details of the new program

The FSC explained that the demand for specialists in financial technology is increasing. The program aims to ensure educational opportunities for the next generation of fintech professionals.

The program is going to start the second half of 2020 and will run until 2023 in the financial center in Yeouido district in the capital, Seoul. It is open to employees at financial companies, founders of fintech companies and other job seekers in the sector.

There are two curriculums for applicants to choose from: degree and non-degree programs. The Master’s degree program will recruit 80 students per year, while the non-degree digital finance professional training program will be open to 160 students with conditional financial support.

The contents of the course are advanced theories and hands-on courses for intensive study of digital finance-related fields including big data, cloud, and blockchain.

South Korea is pushing the fintech sector moving forward

In the recent two years, The Korean Financial Services Commission has made major breakthroughs in fintech legislation, including the Special Act on Internet-only Banks, the Fintech Innovation Support Act and the Act on Peer-to-Peer Lending. In the same announcement, the Financial Services Commission said that:

“The regulatory sandbox was launched under the Fintech Innovation Support Act, and a total of 77 ‘innovative financial services’ were designated as of December 18, 2019 for testing their ideas with regulatory exemptions. The government will further develop the fintech industry in areas such as open banking and private data business in the near future.”