The purpose of this course is to provide students with insight in the product development process of financial products, and how this differs from the product development process of more tangible products. More specifically, literature on the interface between marketing and finance will be used to gain a better understanding of these processes. Apart from this more theoretical part of the course, there will be a methodological component in which more attention will be paid to how we may try to find out investors' needs or the existence of different segments of investors and how companies may adapt their product development to incorporate such different segments. Students will be acquainted with advanced statistical techniques to do so.

The course integrates the financial literature on financial product development with the marketing approach towards product development. The course will show that both approaches are complementary to each others and that only by integrating the two approaches the necessary and sufficient conditions for successful financial product development will be fulfilled.

Hooman Estelami, (2012), Marketing Financial Services, Indianapolis, USA: Dog Ear Publishing, ISBN: 978-145750-774-8.

Courses and workload are very demanding for all IB Master courses. Exchange students need to have obtained a Bachelor degree in business. Exchange students need to major in finance in their Master. Students are expected to have basic knowledge about marketing as well as about finance. Moreover, as advanced statistical techniques will be presented, knowledge of and experience in statistics as well as analytical insights are required for this course.