Lessons are universal — the building blocks that work the same in any currency, on any continent. Classes are something else: a curated path through those lessons, anchored in a specific city or region, where the case studies, the regulations, the institutions, and the alternatives are concrete and local.
Net Present Value works the same in Lima as in Lyon. The math doesn't care about your passport. But the discount rate you apply to a project in Lima — informed by Peruvian inflation expectations, the Banco Central de Reserva's policy stance, the dollarization of corporate liabilities, and what alternative returns are actually available there — is wildly different from the one you'd apply in Lyon, where you're looking at a euro-denominated project against ECB policy and German bund yields. Same math; different inputs; different answers.
That's the gap classes fill. The lessons section gives you the universal toolkit. A class shows you how to use that toolkit in a specific institutional and economic context — with the actual companies, regulators, currencies, and capital markets you'd encounter on the ground.
The principles, formulas, and frameworks that apply everywhere. Time value of money, NPV, risk and return, capital budgeting. Currency-agnostic. Self-paced. Free to audit.
Curated paths through the lessons, with local case studies, regional regulations, and city-specific institutions. Each class assumes you're learning to operate in a particular economic context.
Each class anchors itself in a city or region whose financial institutions, history, or industries make it a useful lens on a particular set of finance topics. The lessons referenced below are already published; assignments, quizzes, and full syllabi are in development.
A four-week study-abroad introductory corporate finance class for business undergraduates, taught in Paris. Twelve class sessions across four weeks, anchored throughout in French-market context: OAT yields, the CAC 40, LVMH, TotalEnergies, Air Liquide, Pernod Ricard. The universal toolkit (time value, inflation, risk, cash flow, valuation) applied through the lens of Paris-listed firms and the institutional structure of European capital markets.
A comparative case-based course on how countries around the world design, regulate, and reinvent their financial systems. The premise is that economic conditions, historical experience, and cultural values shape the financial products a country builds — which is why the same problems (moving money, extending credit, insuring risk, verifying identity, saving for retirement) get solved very differently in Lima than they do in London or Lagos. Students work through original Globefin case studies across eight content areas: banking, payments, lending, identity, insurance, investing, the innovation process, and a cross-cutting opening module on global financial systems. The course also asks the harder questions behind the products: how values, religion, and public policy shape what financial services even look like; what the unintended consequences of financial innovation actually are; and what ethical financial citizenship means in a globalizing economy.
Taught as a COIL course (Collaborative Online International Learning) in partnership with a Peruvian university. US and Peruvian students share a virtual classroom, work through the same cases together, and complete joint module assignments. The structural advantage is that Peruvian students bring lived experience of an emerging-market financial system that has been through hyperinflation, pioneered private pension reform, dollarized informally, and built mobile-money infrastructure (Yape, Plin, BIM) that rivals anything in the developed world. Discussions about why a country’s payment system looks the way it does become much sharper when half the class actually uses that system every day.
A comparative case-based course on how countries around the world design, regulate, and reinvent their financial systems. The premise is that economic conditions, historical experience, and cultural values shape the financial products a country builds — which is why the same problems (moving money, extending credit, insuring risk, verifying identity, saving for retirement) get solved very differently in Casablanca than they do in London or Lagos. Students work through original Globefin case studies across eight content areas: banking, payments, lending, identity, insurance, investing, the innovation process, and a cross-cutting opening module on global financial systems. The course also asks the harder questions behind the products: how values, religion, and public policy shape what financial services even look like; what the unintended consequences of financial innovation actually are; and what ethical financial citizenship means in a globalizing economy.
Taught in Morocco as a study-abroad program, based in Casablanca — the country’s financial capital and home to Casablanca Finance City, the designated regional hub linking European, Middle Eastern, and West African capital flows. Morocco is uniquely well-suited to the course’s comparative thesis: a Muslim-majority economy with a French-influenced banking system, a deliberate and late adopter of participatory banking (Islamic finance) under a 2017 law, a managed-float currency rather than a freely-traded one, a significant unbanked population still moving onto digital rails, and a deliberate national strategy to become MENA-Africa’s financial gateway. Students see how religion, colonial history, sovereign strategy, and Africa-positioning all interact to produce a financial system that looks nothing like the textbook version.
Kentucky has a real venture ecosystem — concentrated in Louisville and Lexington, anchored by healthcare (Humana), spirits (Brown-Forman, Beam Suntory), advanced manufacturing, and increasingly biotech and AI. This class teaches venture finance through the lens of regional ecosystems: term sheets, capital budgeting at 25%+ discount rates, ownership-stake mathematics, and dilution all work the same in Lexington as in Palo Alto, but the deal flow, the talent pool, and the realistic exit landscape differ. Useful for anyone building or evaluating ventures outside the Bay Area bubble.
California — specifically San Francisco, the South Bay, and increasingly Los Angeles — accounts for roughly 40% of US venture funding and is the global capital of fintech. Stripe, Coinbase, Plaid, Block, Chime, and dozens more were built within an hour's drive. This class uses California's fintech corridor to teach how software is reshaping payments, lending, brokerage, banking infrastructure, and asset management — and where the limits of disruption actually are. Pairs the universal financial toolkit with the specific patterns of how technology companies build financial products.
Each class will, over time, accumulate the structure of a real course: graded assignments, end-of-section quizzes, a syllabus you can follow week by week, and (eventually) peer discussion. The lessons themselves are the foundation. The classes are where they become an education.
In the meantime, the lessons stand on their own. Start there.
Browse the lessons →