PGE - Finance

EDHEC MSc in Financial Engineering

[Laurent Deville. Academic Director Finance Masters Programmes ]

When we are talking about financial engineering and the MSc in financial engineering, we are talking about quantitative finance in a sense. We are talking about managing money either from the buy side or from the sell side of the industry.

So this is quantitative. This is finance. This is about financial products. This is about models. This is about pricing products. This is about managing risk and products. If you go to financial engineering, you are going to specialise in capital markets. 

EDHEC's goal is this one: Let's make an impact. Let's make an impact on the industry. Let's make an impact on future generations.

Students need to have the knowledge and competencies that will allow them to change the industry, to change the jobs, to change finance, in a sense.

[Emmanuel Jurczenko - Director of Graduate Finance Programmes]

We have designed this programme so that first the student
will start by following core courses. But then students need
to choose rapidly to specialise in one specific concentration
related to their professional project. There are three concentrations that they can choose: 

The first one is named concentration in quantitative trading. And obviously, this is for students that want to pursue a career in trading. Should it be sales traders, trader or structurer.

Then we got the second concentration in investment solutions and this is for students that want to work in the traditional asset management industry as portfolio analyst or portfolio manager. 

And we added a new concentration,
which is on alternative assets for students that would like to specialise in the alternative fund space, private equity, infrastructure funds or real estate funds, commodities hedge funds.

We also bring our students to one capital city, one financial centre. It could be London, for instance. And the purpose here is for them to exchange, to meet some industry professionals,
to also connect and visit some very specialised companies
which are related to their project.

And we got a list of EDHEC research centres that are oriented toward the industry. And all the centres, basically they are contributing to the curriculum. What is very, very important for me as director of the Graduate Finance Programme, is the capacity for students to find the job that they search for.

We got a lot of industry experts, we got a lot of companies that are visiting us and the feedback we receive is: Wow, your graduates, they are very good. They got the right mindset.

They got good skill sets and they are here to contribute to the future of the finance industry.

[Music] Make an Impact. EDHEC logo.

EDHEC MSc in Climate Change & Sustainable Finance

[Gilles Guerassimoff - Director of the MSc in Climate Change & Sustainable Finance / MINES Paris- PSL] 

MINES Paris and EDHEC have created a new programme, a new master's programme which is called  Climate Change and Sustainable Finance. In this collaboration between EDHEC and MINES Paris, we have two top-ranking schools. One specialised in finance, the top-ranked finance school, and one top-ranked engineering school. So it was natural to make this kind of association.

It is important to establish a good curriculum to provide some basis about engineering in accordance with energy systems, for example. Because energy is the aim of climate change for three-quarters of emissions. And so, they have to master the basis of physics. It is one part of the curriculum. And after that, they must have a lot of knowledge of all the energy chain and all the actual technology and all the future technology. And it is on this basis
that we establish the curriculum, beginning with the basics of physics in an energy chain, and thereafter we want them to have a very long-term perspective. And so we had some modules
dedicated to prospective studies. We have some specific courses
on energy chain for production and, of course, to master
what is the life of a system, what we call the life
cycle assessment of the system, to be sure that when we are designing a new system it’s designed in a good way, with the lowest impact on the environment.

[David Olivier Zerbib, Director of the MSc in Climate Change & Sustainable Finance / EDHEC Business School]

Sustainable finance is a broad concept that embeds environmental finance, and it touches on the notions of how we, as investors can have a positive impact on society through our investments. The demand comes from all stakeholders, from international finance institutions, institutional investors, banks, asset managers to NGOs, consulting firms, corporations. The range of jobs offered is quite broad.

It can be a sustainable investor in a bank or in a management company. Sustainable economists at the IMF, the World Bank, or a central bank or a sustainable analyst  in a consulting company or an NGO. 

The students work on a wide variety of projects for example, sustainable agriculture, carbon capture and storage, circular economy, how finance can have an impact on biodiversity, or how you can embed climate measures, climate metrics
into traditional risk metrics. The students work on that project
with an institution and they are evaluated on the solution
they can offer to the institution. And the solution is often
theoretical and empirical.

So you have to design a solution and apply this solution. Of course, I wish my students happiness and fulfilment in their professional careers. 

I hope that the skills that they will have acquired in the MSc will help them be key players in the transition, and participate in the transformation of business models to be consistent with the objective of sobriety that we have to achieve.

Accounting tells a story. Too often, younger students come to classes with anxiety about accounting being maths, being complex, mathematical analysis... 

No. Accounting is really about a story. It's about organising all these data, this information impacts an organisation and from that, try to better steer, better reach corporate goals in the future. And we try to best prepare our students to develop strong numerical skills especially in terms of valuation, in terms of financial analysis We want them to be able to deal with complex accounting issues such as: deferred taxes... how those complex accounting issues influence the decision-making process of investors, creditors.

We have the chance in the programme to have an excellent partner in the name of PwC. Their consultants come to the classroom and share important questions with our students through case studies, round tables, brainstorming... So it helps us to always refresh the message. The faculty always try to renew the message, always try to keep up with market development to give you an example, in my own course
which is international accounting We try to always pay attention to pressing topics such as climate change and we explain to our students, how traditional accounting plays a role in helping tomorrow's decision-makers, hopefully, do the "right" choices.

Once our students have graduated, they join typically auditing companies. So they are becoming consultants, they are being active in transaction services so they either help their corporate clients to transform the company deal with transactions such as: 
merger & acquisitions, the due diligence for instance is an important aspect of any transaction. So it's basically an in-depth investigation of the company,  you are trying to partner with our students also join the research industry, because they become equity analyst because with the programme they have a strong set of skills in both accounting and also corporate finance.

EDHEC MSc in Corporate Finance & Banking

[Hamid Boustanifar - Programme in Finance]

The MSc in Corporate Finance & Banking is where the students are provided with skills required to do financial analysis of companies.

The structure of the programme is in a way that at the beginning of the programme, especially the first semester, basically takes all the fundamentals core courses.

Then going towards the second semester, they are offered a variety of electives where they could choose to specialise
in a particular path. For example: Private Equity, Decentralised finance, or more towards Financial Analysis & Accounting etc.

Through the electives, basically, we offer many emerging topics, emerging fields. We start to teach on textual analysis machine learning as an elective for a student.

A lot of variety of these courses that the students, they can choose and these evolve to be consistent with what reality and the business is demanding from us.

We have a long-lasting partnership with Société Générale which is one of the major investment banks in the world and that provides huge opportunities for our students and resources for them, because, basically through this partnership and sponsorship of the programme.
We get to meet their experts, they frequently come to the campus... teaching our students and sharing their knowledge as well as, all sorts of networking opportunities that the students get through them.

Obviously Société Générale, is one of the main recruiters of our students.

This a great resource for these students. These types of courses and skills provides students with future paths and careers to go towards, for example: Investment Banking, within different departments such as being an Equity Research Analyst, or M&A department within an investment bank, or an ECM and DCM departments... or they could go also towards Private Equity Firm working as a Private Equity Analyst... or working for Consulting companies such as McKinsey, Deloitte, PwC...

Or ultimately going for non-financial corporations to work within the Treasury departments or maybe the CFO of the company.

[Music] Make an Impact. EDHEC logo.