UC Berkeley Adopts Financial Engineering Software

  • By Mike Hohenbrink
  • 09/24/12

University of California, Berkeley has adopted software for use by its financial engineering students to gain hands-on experience with marketing models, pricing, and managing complex derivatives.

The school will gain access to software and a library of material from New York City, NY-headquartered Numerix, an analytics provider, through its Academic Partners Program for use with the school's undergraduate finance program.

Software included in the agreement allows price calculations to be undertaken for specific situations, such as for structured products and derivatives, permits scenarios to be analyzed, and allows a number of standard marketing models to be included in calculations, among other functions.

A comprehensive library is part of the deal with single- and multi-factor models and numerical methods. Students will also have access to hundreds of templates and a "Structuring Wizard" to allow for setup of new deal types.

The university's Haas School of Business, with enrollment of 700 undergraduate students, is integrating software from the partnership into the current fall curriculum for the 2012/2013 academic year. As part of the integration, a new course offering "Introduction to Financial Engineering" has been added for financial engineering majors, designed to lay out the specific realities and demands on graduates who work in institutional settings.

With the agreement, students in the program will have the option of training, support, and educational seminars at no cost.

Students in the school's program will also receive priority consideration for upcoming internships.

In addition, students gain access to a number of Numerix analytics solutions.

Specific features of the agreement include:

  • CrossAsset XL, an Excel-based platform for structuring, pricing and analyzing derivatives and other structured products;
  • Numerix CrossAsset SDK, APIs in C#, C++ and Java used to embed analytics in third-party or proprietary systems;
  • Guided support;
  • Full-featured software licenses for use in teaching and non-commercial research; and
  • Two free days of training designed to help students and faculty more fully integrate Numerix offerings into the curriculum.

"With Numerix software as an integral part of our new Financial Engineering course students will gain valuable practical experience pricing exotic derivatives, using the same valuation models quantitative finance professionals rely on in today's complex derivatives market," said Ethan Namvar, lecturer at Berkeley's Haas School of Business . "Our aspiring developers, quantitative analysts and FEs will have the opportunity to become acclimated to the industry standard for analytics software and come to understand how theory and quantitative methods can be applied to a real-world framework."

More information on the Academic Partners Program can be found at numerix.com/numerix-academic-partners.

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