Overview

Our BSc Finance (including foundation year) is open to Home and EU students. It will be suitable for you if your academic qualifications do not yet meet our entrance requirements for the three-year version of this course and you want a programme that increases your subject knowledge as well as improves your academic skills.

This four-year course includes a foundation year (Year Zero) on the Essex Business School Pathway, followed by a further three years of study. During your Year Zero, you study four academic subjects relevant to your chosen course, preparing you for further study, as well as a compulsory English language and academic skills module.

You are an Essex student from day one, a member of our global community based at the most internationally diverse campus university in the UK.

After successful completion of Year Zero in our Essex Pathways Department, you progress to complete your course with Essex Business School.

This course prepares you for a fast-paced career in any area of finance.

You have access to our virtual trading floor, where you can trade multiple markets from a single screen with industry leading software, X_TRADER. You can also use real-world Bloomberg Market Data Feed (B-PIPE), within minutes of it being released, so you can practise making business decisions in the same way you might in the workplace.

The course examines international financial markets, as well as how finance shapes leadership, strategy and planning within organisations.

Topics may include:

• the pricing of securities in financial markets
• risk management
• corporate finance and financial decision making
• business economics
• quantitative methods
• financial modelling
• portfolio analysis

We use real-life examples to apply theory to practice and develop your capacity to analyse statistics. Ethics underpins all of our teaching, so you can graduate with the ability to make sound, responsible financial decisions for the benefit of organisations and their stakeholders.

Your first year ensures you receive a fully-rounded business education by introducing you to topics such as marketing, economics, management and accounting.

In your final year, you have the opportunity to put your knowledge into practice by completing an in depth, independent research project or dissertation. This gives you the chance to further develop vital employability skills in areas of research, project management and critical thinking.

BSc Finance also gives you the option to follow a specialised pathway in Applied Quantitative Methods (AQM).

With employers looking for graduates with data analysis skills, The University of Essex is one of just three UK universities to have received Q-Step Affiliate status. By completing necessary AQM modules, your quantitative skills are evidenced on your degree transcript to give you the competitive edge in the jobs market. We can also provide work placement bursaries to develop your skills in evaluating numerical evidence, analysing data and designing research.

Essex Business School, where this course is taught, is an IMC Advantage Partner. This course is aligned to the Investment Management Certificate (IMC) syllabus, the industry’s benchmark entry-level qualification.

The University of Essex is also a member of the CFA Institute University Affiliation Program, enabling us to award up-to six exceptional students each year with a scholarship that goes towards the fees for the CFA Program Level One exam, so you can start your journey of becoming a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). Achieving this accolade is one way to enhance your CV if you’re interested in pursuing a career in investment management.

Our expert staff

You’re taught by a group of highly qualified and enthusiastic academics and practitioners with diverse research interests. Their work has been discussed in the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve and we have one of the largest finance groups in the country.

Our staff all with wide-ranging research interests and proven academic track records. Their research informs your lectures and seminars, so you learn about the latest issues impacting the finance sector globally.

Our staff join us from all over the world and specialise in areas such as:

• bank risk and regulation
• foreign bank ownership
• finance of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs)
• bank mergers
• acquisitions and financial econometrics
• growth and poverty; drivers of commodity prices.

Joining us from the Bank of England where he was a Senior Technical Advisor with special responsibility for coordinating research activities in Monetary Analysis, Professor Simon Price combines his academic and professional expertise to expertly inform his teaching on our Finance and Banking courses.

Professor Neil Kellard, Dean of Essex Business School and member of the Finance Group, studies the commodities markets and whether it is possible to model and forecast the price of commodities in order to predict global crises in food supplies, often considered the trigger for wider political conflict.

Why we’re great

• We equip you with the necessary knowledge and skills to succeed at Essex and beyond.
• Small class sizes allow you to work closely with your teachers and classmates.
• You’ll benefit from access to our virtual trading floor.

Structure

Course structure

The course structure is designed to cover everything a future leader in the financial industry may need to know.

Year zero provides with you the necessary skills and knowledge in order for you to progress onto your chosen area of study. Successful completion of year zero guarantees you entry to the first year of your undergraduate degree course.

In the first year our current students cover a more broad range of business topics, as well as being introduced to accounting and finance. However, we are planning some changes to our first year and we’ll be tailoring it more closely to your chosen course. After that your compulsory modules will cover topics such as risk management, financial markets, quantitative methods and portfolio analysis. You’ll also be able to pick from a variety of optional modules to further your understanding of your favourite finance topics or to explore other areas of the business world.

We offer a flexible course structure with a mixture of core/compulsory modules, and optional modules chosen from lists. Please be aware that we are planning changes to our first year to make it more relevant to your chosen course.

Our research-led teaching is continually evolving to address the latest challenges and breakthroughs in the field. The course content is therefore reviewed on an annual basis to ensure our courses remain up-to-date so modules listed are subject to change.

Teaching and learning disclaimer

Following the impact of the pandemic, we made changes to our teaching and assessment to ensure our current students could continue with their studies uninterrupted and safely. These changes included courses being taught through blended delivery, normally including some face-to-face teaching, online provision, or a combination of both across the year.

The teaching and assessment methods listed show what is currently approved for 2022 entry; changes may be necessary if, by the beginning of this course, we need to adapt the way we’re delivering them due to the external environment, and to allow you to continue to receive the best education possible safely and seamlessly.

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