Corporate Finance Essentials will enable you to understand key financial issues related to companies, investors, and the interaction between them in the capital markets. By the end of this course you should be able to understand most of what you read in the financial press and use the essential financial vocabulary of companies and finance professionals.

This final course will cover more advanced aspects of bonds and stocks that will help you make smart personal decisions and develop a keen understanding of how governments and companies borrow from us. You will better understand stocks and bonds valuation and take a deeper dive using real-world problems. For stocks, you will review what you have already learned and understand valuation. You will learn about growth, different types of growth both bad and good. You will also get an opportunity to apply these concepts in practice assignments. For bonds: you will review what you have already learned. You will learn about different sources of risk in bonds. Lastly you will get an opportunity to apply these concepts in practice assignments. After completing this course, you will have a deeper understanding of how bonds and stocks are valued and the risks involved in both. You will be able to apply this knowledge to understand the workings of a company and how it creates value. This will enable you to invest with more confidence and also bring a special and critical lens to a company’s decisions. This course is part of the four-course Foundational Finance for Strategic Decision Making Specialization.

In this course, participants will learn about the key financial decisions modern corporations face, as well as the alternative methods that can be employed to optimize the value of the firm’s assets. This is part of a Specialization in corporate finance created in partnership between the University of Melbourne and Bank of New York Mellon (BNY Mellon).

The Budgeting Essentials and Development course focus on an integrative and practical view of concepts, methods, and techniques to develop a budget. After finishing this course, learners will be able to: - Develop the budget with a broad view of the corporate functions; - Integrate the strategic guidelines into the discussions of budgeting process; - Structure the budget planning and development in a logical sequence - Coordinate the project of budget planning with the different areas of the company - Actively promote assumptions discussions to improve the process of developing the budget - Apply financial concepts to support the budget planning process - Design a budget monitoring and control model to support the performance management - Evaluate the performance of the company by managing the results and the budget In this course, learners will have a deeper understanding of the budgeting process, its challenges, common issues, and approaches to mitigate the problems and improve the learning curve of budget planning. It is integrative by emphasizing the transition between the corporate strategy and the budget. It is practical by following a structured process of going through a framework that illustrates and demonstrates how to analyze, develop and control the budget.

This course focuses on examining various practical applications of the fundamental financial analysis and valuation techniques employed in the investment banking industry. Specifically, we will examine how to analyze how a private equity firm or other financial sponsor completes a leveraged buyout of a company, how a public company analyzes the impact of acquiring a company on its earnings per share, and how a company completes an initial public offering. The course will benefit anyone who desires to increase their ability to understand and execute M&A and capital markets transactions, including (but not limited to), entrepreneurs, consultants, bankers, investors, analysts, corporate managers, marketers, strategists, and dealmakers of all types.

The Capstone Project is the final part of the Essentials of Corporate Financial Analysis and Decision-Making MOOC Specialization. The Capstone is designed to allow students to bring together the skills acquired and knowledge gained over the preceding four courses of the Specialization by taking on the role of a financial analyst tasked with advising a wealthy private client on a significant strategic investment in a large listed firm operating across the globe. View the MOOC promotional video here: http://tinyurl.com/j9fqv25

This course focuses on adopting and implementing a financially analytic mindset when analyzing organizational activities, position and performance. This course begins with an overview of an organization’s financial statements, including the balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, as well as the transactions that comprise these statements. You will learn about tools and ratios that help analyze these financial statements and transactions. Financial statement analysis will help you understand how the company has performed in the past and its current position. This analysis - as well as course content on forecasting both short- and long-term performance - enables you to draw inferences, make predictions about the organization's future performance and value. Ultimately, this course provides a "deep-dive" into the multi-dimensional nature of financial analysis and how it used to assess the value of organizations.

DeFi and the Future of Finance is a set of four courses that focus on decentralized finance. The second course is called DeFi Primitives. It is recommended that you take the first course, DeFi Infrastructure, before this course. In this course, we talk about transaction mechanics and introduce both fungible and non-fungible tokens – or NFTs. The course explores the important issue of custody (holding private keys). The course then explores supply adjustment which includes the minting and burning of tokens. The mechanics of bonding curves are introduced. The course then explores the role of direct as well as indirect incentives in the DeFi system. We then analyze swaps or decentralized exchange. We begin by contrasting DEX with centralized exchange (e.g., Coinbase or Binance). The course details the mechanics of Automated Market Makers and provides a number of detailed examples. There is a discussion of impermanent loss as well as (legal) front-running. We end the course by exploring both collateralized and flash loans.

In this Capstone project, you will have to choose between three different characters (each with a unique set of financial constraints and objectives) and design an appropriate wealth plan for them over the next 5 years. You will have to use the knowledge you gained in each of the four preceding courses to reach that objective. Indeed, you will need to know which assets to consider and how to manage them depending on changes in the economic outlook (Course 1), how to evaluate and deal with your character's emotional biases in order to suggest them a wealth strategy they will be able to follow (Course 2), how to build an optimal portfolio and manage its risk once the strategy has been designed (Course 3) and how to adequately measure the performance of your plan while taking advantage of investment vehicles and future trends in the investment management industry to further your character's goals (Course 4). This Capstone project was designed in collaboration with UBS, our corporate partner, who benefits from years of experience in guiding clients with their wealth planning.

This course will teach you how to manage a startup’s financing strategy, where you will learn how to build capitalization tables (or “cap tables”) in Excel. Cap tables will help you explore different financing strategies for your startup company and determine which financing decisions are best for your entrepreneurial venture. You will also learn about innovations in the digital space that allow new ways to finance entrepreneurial ventures. These include different forms of crowdfunding, and alternative credit scoring mechanisms based on web-based data. This course concludes with a module featuring cutting edge research from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business on the financial technology industry. In this module, you will learn how financial technology companies are disrupting the credit scoring industry by developing new methods for credit scoring using consumers’ digital footprints. In addition, you will explore how financial technology platforms have introduced new, experimental forms of financing, such as crowdfunding.