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Leavey School of Business Associate Professor Seoyoung Kim knows the value of a change in perspective.

When leading custom education programs for the Leavey Executive Center, she uses a framework called “flipping the script” to get high-powered and highly accomplished individuals to think from a perspective that differs from their day-to-day reality. 

For example, she might ask an entrepreneur to step into the shoes of a potential investor instead. What questions would they have about a new product or idea? How do they view market challenges and opportunities differently than, say, someone leading a startup? On the flipside, Kim might have a potential investor place themselves in the role of that startup head — forcing them to practice pitching an idea to a highly skeptical audience.

“This type of exercise becomes critical and eye-opening, even for these very seasoned people,” Kim says.

Kim serves as department chair and associate professor of finance and business analytics at the Leavey School of Business. Her research and scholarship leans heavily into innovation in financial markets and Fintech, expertise that makes her a strong fit for work with the Leavey Executive Center.

She first started giving guest lectures for the center a decade ago, but in recent years she has been more involved in designing custom programming. For example, she designed and led a digital finance program for visiting students from the KAIST College of Business in Korea. Most recently, she created a Financial Academy program on “Investing in Fintech Businesses,” a partnership between the Leavey Executive Center and the Saudi Tadawul Group that’s now going into its second cohort of students.

Custom Design

When figuring out what to teach, Kim starts with an analysis of who she’ll be teaching. 

“I want to know what sectors these people work in, and what type of roles they have in that sector,” Kim says. “You could be a finance person in tech. You could be a tech person at a financial institution.” Each role comes with different experiences and expectations.

With the next cohort of the Financial Academy program, for instance, she’s delivering a survey in advance to gauge knowledge of and experience with Fintech offerings. That helps her know how deep she needs to go into basic concepts before moving along to deeper dives about the regulatory environment and exercises such as “flipping the script.”

“People throw around the word Fintech,” Kim says, “That's just a newer word that popped up in the last 10 years or so. But understanding Fintech requires a strong understanding of institutional finance and traditional finance, now, because it’s always a transition. Once upon a time, tools that are commonplace now, like credit cards — they were new Fintech, even if we didn't call them that.”

New Fintech products, services or processes that end up standing the test of time will be like credit cards, Kim notes. Eventually, 20 to 30 years from now, they’ll be considered traditional finance. So a primary goal for the Financial Academy is to give participants a framework for developing, assessing and investing those tools that will have staying power.

“I like to tee them up with some of these seemingly simple things, but then break apart the underlying market mechanism,” she says. As an example, she offers the process of getting a loan. It’s a fairly well established process, and straightforward on the surface. But behind the scenes, new tech and evolving ways to assess risk have expanded the world of loans greatly, with more options such as subprime loans and nonconforming mortgages.

“A lot of people don't understand all of the things that happen on the back end to enable changes like this,” she says. “When these methods came about, you could consider them to be Fintech right? It's a mathematical innovation where the math had been around for centuries to be able to do it, but no one had.”

A Balanced and Critical Eye

Over the course of the five-day Financial Academy program, Kim walks students through examples of failures and successes in the world of Fintech, explores the world of regulatory compliance and ethics, offers processes and tips for analyzing Fintech startups and finding the right venture capital fit, and more. Along the way, she draws on the expertise of fellow Leavey faculty as guest lecturers, including financial adviser Karl Motey and former electronics executive Dan Trepanier. Both bring practical experience to their roles and to the discussion.

Ultimately, Kim says she sees the most “a-ha” moments during those script-flipping sessions later in the program. “Whether you’re an entrepreneur trying to raise money or an investor trying to vet an idea, you benefit from this shift in perspective.”

She says approaching a challenge or idea from a different angle helps people define the basics. It also leads to new questions. What’s the need for this idea? Does it serve an underserved market? Is that market viable for the long-term? Is anyone else pursuing something similar? 

‘What we find with successful Fintech products is that there is something clearly very different about them,” Kim says. Something that sets them apart in the market, in other words — a unique value proposition. But an entrepreneur must be able to clearly define that difference so they can sell it, and a potential investor must be able to understand both the upsides and the level of risk involved.

“Anyone who's trying to raise money has to understand how an investor thinks,” Kim says. “On the other side, from an investment standpoint, you won't be as naive after going through the experience of actually trying to pitch something. Hopefully you'll look at things with a more balanced and critical eye.”