The National Science Foundation has selected Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey to lead the first-ever industry-university cooperative research center, or IUCRC, devoted to financial technology and science. The list of firms who provided letters of support as part of Stevens’ bid included UBS, Bank of America, Citi, Royal Bank of Canada, CME Group and OneMarketData among them.
Among the initial areas of focus in the IUCRC will be cybersecurity; high-frequency automated markets; technology risk and regulation; commercialization; and applications of blockchain, quantum computing, natural language processing and AI to the finance industry.
Stevens includes Georgetown University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and between eight and 25+ companies that aim to find innovative solutions for complex challenges facing the fintech industry. George Calhoun, director of the Hanlon Financial Systems Center at Stevens School of Business and a co-principal investigator on the project, said in a statement: “Georgetown is good in traditional finance and the regulatory end of the business — what is the Federal Reserve going to do, what is the Treasury going to do — in ways that reflect their own location advantage. And RPI brings additional scientific and technological capabilities to the table.”