Swinburne Uni brings Web3 firms to class

Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology has partnered with two financial technology firms which will provide its students exposure to the financial technology and cryptocurrency business world.

The partnership is between Swinburne and small business loan provider Judo Bank along with Banxa, a payment service provider with a fiat-to-crypto platform whose clients include Binance, KuCoin and hardware wallet Trezor, among others.

Students of the university’s Master of Financial Technology (fintech) course will be “exposed to real life examples and cases across the spectrum of financial services,” Dimitrios Salampasis Swinburne’s director of the master of fintech told Cointelegraph.

Salampasis said Judo Bank is “one of the most innovative fintech unicorns, one of the very few unicorns in Australia,” while Banxa is a “massively interesting organization” that is “very serious in the job that they do in the blockchain and the crypto space:”

“This space is very new. I mean, when I put together the course a couple of years ago, we didn’t really know what that would mean. Other universities around the globe have different fintech offerings, but I believe, particularly for the fintech space, you need some proper working experience.”

“Maybe they want to show our students some simulations of their processes, do some sort of presentation on their products and services or have a debate,” he said, “maybe even give our students a real project to work on.”

The partnership sees Banxa and Judo Bank co-creating content, hosting lectures and providing case studies. Students will have access to each of the companies’ networks as part of the partnership, which Salampasis says will allow the industry to “tap into future talent:”

“The whole vision behind this degree is to bring industry in to ensure relevance on the things we teach and to be able to bring these real life insights for leadership in the classroom. We can ensure that the students get exposed to whatever the latest developments are in the space, because the general fintech space is moving so quickly.”

Salampasis was 2021’s Blockchain Educator of the Year Awardee from the country’s main industry body Blockchain Australia.

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Cointelegraph reported last week that Salampasis had been one of the few people Finder spoke to for its regular predictions survey who warned about the inherent risks in the Terra ecosystem, which subsequently collapsed.

He said the event had caused terrible publicity for the space, but he was hopeful with more education such situations could be avoided in the future:

“In general, blockchain and crypto have received a lot of negative attention and publicity. Part of our role as a university is to ‘de-risk’ the space, to provide real information, real awareness, educate our students to become the next leaders in the space and to work with people who actually know what they’re doing.”