Center for Innovative
Financial Technology
Benefits for CIFT Sponsors
We appreciate your interest in supporting the Center for Innovative Financial Technology (CIFT) at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. The support from our sponsors is essential in helping us realize the mission of the Center to facilitate innovative research and teaching on new investment technologies and strategies, and in promoting broader understanding of the societal benefits and risks associated with ever more wired global markets.
We seek to benefit students and staff by offering state-of-the-art facilities, tools, and data. Additionally, we use modern web approaches to accumulate and share expertise among faculty, students, industry, and academic collaborators.
Sponsors can propose research projects and ideas, and collaborate with faculty, students, staff and affiliates to address topics that may be hard to fit into a busy, product oriented R&D setting. Their interaction with the people doing this work will be much richer than would be realized simply by reading what might eventually end up in a working paper or report.
Our partner firms benefit in a variety of tangible and non tangible ways. Each year, there are nearly 1,000 graduates in finance and related fields, including undergraduates, MBAs, MFEs (Masters in Financial Engineering), MAs, and PhDs. As a group, they represent prospective future employees and customers for trading, investment, and financial technology customers.
Center sponsors enjoy benefits in familiarizing Berkeley students and staff with their firms, through the ability to participate in seminars on financial technology, which (with your permission) will become part of the CIFT accumulated electronic knowledge base. These graduates are the people who will be making purchase decisions for financial information products as they join the workforce. Involvement at the center provides a valuable focused audience, able to realize a much deeper familiarity with your firm than can be achieved via other marketing approaches.
Exceptional employees are one of the most important assets for any firm, and Center sponsorship is a great opportunity there as well. Sponsors have access to students, as interns, as summer hires, and as academic users of their products. On simple cost basis, support of the center could easily offset substantial recruiting and hiring costs elsewhere.
Finally, Berkeley is one of the world’s great research universities. CIFT’s research will take a multidisciplinary approach. By working with some of the world’s leading computer scientists, economists, and mathematicians, CIFT sponsors will receive ideas for innovative uses for their present systems and strategies, as well as ideas for future offerings. Center sponsors will have direct access to this research as well as unique opportunities to interact with the researchers themselves, both electronically and on campus.
Sponsors also have access to a variety of events, seminars, and lectures at Haas, and in the broader university community. We anticipate organizing at least one annual event on campus, and sharing this electronically with those who are unable to attend in person.
We are happy to answer any of your questions regarding this sponsorship opportunity. Additionally, we invite you to visit our campus to see firsthand our outstanding school and meet the faculty, staff, and students involved in CIFT. Again, we thank you for your interest in supporting the Center for Innovative Financial Technology.
David Leinweber, Founding Director
626-644-4514, djl@haas.berkeley.edu
Tony Ganger, Director, Corporate and Foundation Relations
510-642-1907, tganger@haas.berkeley.edu
