How Software Ate Finance

In early 2019, Stanford GSB leadership proposed to Marty that he teach a course for business-school students. In the course, Marty would share his first-hand experience on how software had transformed the financial industry, and his views on the industry's future evolution. Marty readily agreed to create and teach Stanford GSBGEN 544: How Software Ate Finance.

Beginning in early 2020, Marty and outgoing Stanford GSB lead case writer Jeffrey Conn — a Goldman Sachs alumnus and financial-services investor — began crafting the structure and materials for the course. The video lectures offer an overview of the sector, from widely understood topics — banking, payments, money, capital markets, regulation, data, and asset management — to topics that are less broadly understood: Intersubjective realities, the rise of APIs, and multi-asset trade lifecycles from execution to clearing and settlement.

We have made the course content available in its entirety here on Marty's site. The course is also available on Coursera, for certificate credit.

Course Description

Software is eating the world, with radical consequences for financial services. This course gives you a foundation for understanding the future of financial services, and guides you in creating fintech businesses in the 2020s and beyond.

The course has three objectives:

1. We present a roadmap for the evolution of the financial system, where traditional dichotomies — trader / engineer, buy side / sell side, regulated / non-regulated, infrastructure provider / infrastructure user, data provider / data consumer — give way to an ecosystem organized around producers and consumers of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), the rise of platforms and financial cloud providers, and the transformation of Wall Street economics into software economics.

2. We study the transformation of financial services through software, surveying payments, deposits and credit cards, securities and derivatives, capital markets, digital assets (including cryptocurrencies and blockchain mechanisms), financing and lending, wealth and asset management, and regulation and compliance.

3. We invite leading innovators to address how software has shaped their experiences; identify fundamental drivers; and forecast trends, challenges, and opportunities.

Nota bene

• Several of the course materials, including news articles and the assigned HBS case studies on Marcus and Goldman Sachs' digital transformation, are available for purchase or live behind a paywall. Note that the video lectures are free, and do not require any pre-requisite readings.

• Marty at times refers to the attendance of class guests in the video lectures. Stanford University policy does not allow us to post the video recordings of the live class sessions.

Professor R. Martin Chávez (“Marty”)

Marty is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and risk manager.  From 1993 to 2019, he held multiple roles as a partner, Management Committee member, and senior leader of Goldman Sachs, including Chief Information Officer, Chief Financial Officer, and global co-head of the Firm's largest and most complex business, the Securities Division.  Since retiring from the Firm in 2019, Marty continues to serve as a Senior Director of Goldman Sachs.  

For the past 35 years, Marty has used data, math, software, and machine learning to solve hard problems for clients and stakeholders. Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, Marty was the CEO and co-founder of Kiodex, acquired by Sungard in 2004, and Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Quorum Software Systems.  He holds an A.B. (1985) magna cum laude in Biochemical Sciences and an S.M. (1985) in Computer Science from Harvard, and a Ph.D. (1990) in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford. 

Marty is President of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, and serves on the Board of Directors of Grupo Santander, the Stanford Medicine Board of Fellows, the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  He advises numerous healthcare and machine-learning startups.  Previously, he served on the boards of PNM Resources, Inc., the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), the Friends of the High Line, the Foundation for AIDS Research, and the Santa Fe Opera.

Jeffrey Conn (“Jeff”)

Jeff is the outgoing Lead Case Writer at the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and served as Marty’s course co-creator and co-instructor. Jeff spent a decade in financial services investment banking, private equity and venture capital roles before graduating from Stanford GSB in 2018. He began his career as an analyst in the Financial Institutions Group of Goldman Sachs’ investment banking division, before moving to investment roles at multiple private equity firms on the west and east coast. He is currently managing partner of BroadWest Partners, a private equity firm focused on financial technology and enterprise software opportunities.