The Financial Innovation Hub, brings together the greatest minds on the African continent to lead in the research and innovation of financial technologies. It nestles itself right in the middle of the number one research university in Africa, the University of Cape Town.
Meet some of the faculty members involved.
Dr. Allan Davids is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town and holds the South African Reserve Bank Research Chair in Financial Stability Studies. Allan holds a PhD in Economics from UCT and has spent time as a visiting academic at several leading universities, including the Stern School of Business at New York University, the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London. Allan’s research spans topics from housing, household and consumer finance, and public finance. At UCT, Allan teaches public finance and econometrics and also convenes the Masters in Financial Technology, the first Master’s degree specializing in Financial Technology on the African continent.
Adheesh Budree is an Associate Professor in Information Systems at the University of Cape Town, with a research focus on ICT for Development, the socioeconomics of technology, eCommerce and data analytics. Adheesh has been in Higher Education since 2012, when he took up a lecturing post at the University of the Western Cape. Prior to this he has held various roles in different industries including IT Management Trainee for British American Tobacco South Africa, Marketing Insights Manager for British American Tobacco Gulf Region (Dubai), Forecasting Manager for Brandhouse South Africa, Business Intelligence Manager at AMEtHST Healthcare Systems, and has consulted at national and local government and in the banking sector.
Adheesh has represented South Africa at panel discussions and forums on bodies such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and OHCHR (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Geneva, Switzerland. He has presented several keynotes at international universities in India and Germany, and industry bodies and conferences such as the South African Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Insaka/Payfast Virtual Conference on eCommerce.
Adheesh holds a PhD in Information Systems from the University of the Western Cape, an MSc in Financial Economics from University of London (SOAS), an MA in Creative Writing from UCT, a BSc Honours in Information Systems from UNISA and a BSc Computer Science and Business Information Systems from the University of KZN. In addition, he holds a Postgraduate Certification in Environmental Economics from Rhodes University and a Diploma in Business Analysis from Faculty Training Institute.
Geoff Nitschke is head of the Evolutionary Machine Learning group and associate professor at the department of Computer Science, School of Information Technology, University of Cape Town. He has been working in research on biologically inspired computational intelligence for over 15 years and has over 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings and edited volumes. This research has been
supported by grants totalling more than 15 million ZAR from national and international funding agencies.
Geoff is a strong proponent of evolutionary computation and robotics, consistently presenting at key conferences such as Artificial Life, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation and the IEEE Symposium series on Computational Intelligence. Geoff is also associate editor of the Adaptive Behaviour and Frontiers in Robotics and AI journals, and participates in numerous international research visits, including sabbatical visits in 2017 to the Computational Intelligence Group, VU Amsterdam, Netherlands, Earth Life Sciences Institute, Tokyo, Japan, the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Group, CSIRO, Brisbane, Australia in 2019-2022, and the School of Computing, at Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom in 2022.