MOU announcement: CFTE, The Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship, is partnering with Finance Innovation in France

Finance Innovation – the French government-backed innovation Cluster for the financial industry – and the Centre for Finance Technology & Entrepreneurship (CFTE) – a leading online education platform for finance 2.0 – have partnered to develop the competitiveness of France’s as a world leading financial centre by upskilling its human capital.

Under the terms of the collaboration, Finance Innovation will be the main distributor of the CFTE courses across the whole country. This will provide financial institutions and individuals access to a growing portfolio of courses including a foundational course on FinTech, Application of Artificial Intelligence in Finance and impact of GDPR on business.

Established over a decade ago by the French government and the whole financial ecosystem, Finance Innovation’s mission is to ensure that the national financial services eco-system remain at the forefront of innovation. This is achieved by educating it on the impact of emerging technologies but also connecting it with high-potential start-ups. By working with CFTE, Finance Innovation will be able to directly support its 500 corporate members who are SMEs, banks and Insurers.

Talking about this partnership, Joelle Durieux, CEO of Finance Innovation says: “As the French Cluster dedicated to innovation in the financial sector, we are confident in the capacity of our partner CFTE to bring high level training and expertise to the human resources of our ecosystem”

This announcement comes at the time where the French FinTech eco-system closed US$300 million, a record amount of funding in 2017 for its start-ups. France’s eco-system is further boosted by a series of recent initiatives such as President Emanuel Macron US$1.5 billion investment in Artificial Intelligence, the launch of Tech Ticket packages offering fast-track visa and US$47,000 grant for eligible entrepreneurs, and the opening of Station-F the world’s largest startup campus covering 34,000m2.

In this context, CFTE’s co-founders Huy Nguyen Trieu and Tram Anh Nguyen, themselves French national and based in the UK said: “We are very excited to be working closely with Finance Innovation in France. It is in line with our mission, to aid in the development of human capital with the necessary skills and mindset to thrive in Finance 2.0.”

This partnership provides corporates and individuals expert training program. Delivery will be done either online and at-scale to support large digitization and upskilling efforts or physically in classes for bespoke masterclasses. Nationally this will allow the development of the necessary human capital to ensure that the French FinTech eco-system can grow alongside a sufficiently large trained and talent workforce that understands how finance, technology and entrepreneurship interact.