Aparna Gupta, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute – The Future of Fintech

On Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Week:  Technology can be used to tackle climate change.

Aparna Gupta, professor of quantitative finance at Rensselaer Polytechnic institute, examines this.

Aparna Gupta is a professor of quantitative finance and co-director of the NSF IUCRC Center for Research toward Advancing Financial Technologies (CRAFT) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Gupta also serves as the associate dean for academic affairs of the Lally School of Management at RPI.

Dr. Gupta was a visiting researcher at US SEC in Washington, D.C. for three years. Her research interest is in financial decision support, risk management, and applying mathematical modeling, machine learning, and financial engineering techniques for risk management in technology-enabled network services, as well as risk management in the interconnected financial institutions and financial markets. She has worked on several U.S. NSF and U.S. DoE funded research projects in financial innovations for risk management.

Dr. Gupta’s research has been published in top quantitative finance and operations research journals, and has been awarded various recognitions, including 2018 best paper award of the Financial Management Association and 2019 best conference paper award at the 17th FRAP Conference. She is the author of the book Risk Management and Simulation. Dr. Gupta is a member of WFA, FMA, INFORMS, GARP, and IAQF, and serves on the editorial board of several quantitative finance and analytics journals.

She earned her doctorate from Stanford University and her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in mathematics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

The Future of Fintech

My research focuses on financial decision support, financial engineering, and risk management. I apply a range of mathematical modeling and data analytics techniques in my research. In short, my area of expertise is in financial technologies, or fintech.

I’m working on developing novel data ingestion frameworks for improved financial risk assessment and decision making. One example is using natural language processing techniques, wherein computers are given the ability to understand text and conversation, to determine the impact of climate change on firms and to advise firms on attaining their environmental, social, and governance goals.

I’m also working toward increasing resilience in financial transactions systems that support transparency and efficiency of transactions. These systems are being designed for built-in intelligence for fault, anomalies, and fraud detection.

Fintech is transforming nearly all aspects of financial services, and use of artificial intelligence is pervasive. It is critical that AI’s applications are explainable to the public and that fairness is embedded in the technologies to ensure trust, inclusion, and equity.

Further, fintech offers great promise to tackle climate change and provide pathways for developing sustainable economies and lifestyles. However, broad risk assessment capabilities and disclosures of environmental, social, and governance characteristics are critical to achieving these goals, by enhancing a coordinated effort  and accountability.

Fintech is an exciting field that I believe will continually evolve to meet our needs.