0260 - Data Driven Fintech with Donal Rafferty

Hosted by Alex and Conor. 

Welcome to the UCD 2nd year Economics and Finance class. 

Today, we are pleased to welcome Donal Rafferty, Director Product Development in Open Finance at Mastercard, Dublin.

Thank you for coming in to speak to us today, can you share a little of your own story?

·       So, we’d like to start one of the ideas behind this series of talks. Do you think a finance professional’s working life will involve more or less interaction with dedicated development teams, IT or software engineers?

·       Can you make a case for the value of knowing a bit about programming (e.g. python) for working in Finance.

·       We are extremely interested in what you’ve learnt from experimenting with advanced aspects of LLMs, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, agentic knowledge graphs, and process automation. What do you imagine is going to be the impact on the Finance industry?

·       On your website you used the phrase “embedded finance” a couple of times, can you explain the concept?

·       About your website, you said it was VIBE coded. What motivated you and what did you learn about the process? 

With the time left we’d like to open it to questions from the audience…

Any recommendations for books, podcasts, blogs??

(questions from audience)

Before we finish, is there anything further you'd like to add?

Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your thoughts with us today.

Notes and further reading: Key books, articles, blogs, podcasts, channels

• https://www.donalrafferty.com
• Explore Kaggle for inspiring examples of data analysis - https://www.kaggle.com
• Learn Python and Pandas! There are many resources available, for example, DataCamp - https://www.datacamp.com
• The Unicorn Project and The Phoenix Project. Two books by Gene Kim about tech projects and working in tech.
• Andrew Ng’s AI education platform - https://www.deeplearning.ai/ Register for a free account to get access to Andrew’s videos. (in fact Andrew Ng  coined the term “Agentic AI”, to describe a trend in how people were building applications)

Acknowledgements

Music 

Title: First Take

Artist: Debajyoti Biswas and Michael O'Neill

Source:  mis.aup3

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Cover Art 

Title: Complex collage

Artist: Allen Higgins

Source: DonalRafferty_Mastercard.pptx

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Podcast License

Design Talk (dot IE) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

The license can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

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