Why fintech should be taught as more than a technology subject | Hindustan Times

India’s digital financial ecosystem is operating at enormous scale. The Reserve Bank of India’s Financial Inclusion Index reached 70.0 in March 2026, from 67.0 a year earlier, while UPI processed approximately 23.66 billion transactions in July 2026. This progress raises an important question for fintech education: how should universities prepare students to build services that people can understand and use with confidence?

Why fintech should be taught as more than a technology subjectA loan can be approved in minutes, while its repayment obligations extend over years. An investment can be purchased with a few taps, even when the buyer has only a limited understanding of the risks. For universities preparing the next generation of fintech professionals, the gap between ease of transaction and complexity of decision deserves greater attention.

Fintech education places considerable emphasis on coding, data analytics, artificial intelligence and digital product development. These capabilities are essential, but the decisions graduates will face extend beyond technical performance. How should a product’s costs be presented? What makes a recommendation suitable for a particular customer? When should an automated decision be questioned?

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Answering these questions requires an understanding of finance, regulation and human behaviour alongside technology.

A recurring classroom observation is that technically capable students can struggle to explain their ideas in language that customers understand. Sometimes, even their peers find the explanation difficult to follow. Students may be comfortable describing how a system works while finding it harder to show which financial problem it solves and why someone would use it.

Pairing students from finance and technology backgrounds helps address this gap. In classroom projects, these mixed teams have produced stronger results than teams composed solely of technology students. Peer learning encourages students to question assumptions, explain unfamiliar concepts and connect technical possibilities with financial needs.

Consider a digital lending assignment. Technology students may focus on building a functioning application, while finance students examine its pricing, repayment structure and risks. Working together requires them to consider whether a prospective borrower can understand the offer, compare it with an alternative and recognise the obligations involved.

A monthly instalment displayed prominently may appear affordable while drawing attention away from the total repayment amount. A disclosure may contain the necessary information but remain difficult to interpret. These are design decisions with financial consequences, and they deserve scrutiny alongside the reliability of the software.

Interdisciplinary learning becomes meaningful when students must resolve these tensions. Separate modules in finance, ethics or regulation provide a foundation, but projects and assessments should require students to apply them together.

This prepares graduates for work in which developers, financial specialists, compliance teams and product managers bring different perspectives to the same service. The ability to ask informed questions and communicate across these boundaries is a professional skill in its own right.

AI adds another layer to this responsibility. A financial recommendation can be persuasive and clearly expressed while resting on incomplete information or assumptions that do not suit the customer.

Students therefore need to learn how to interrogate an output. What information informed it? What does it assume about the user’s circumstances? What might it have overlooked? At what point should a person review or challenge the recommendation?

These questions connect data literacy with financial knowledge and accountability. Students could examine an AI-generated recommendation against a customer’s financial position, needs and tolerance for risk, then explain whether they would accept, revise or reject it.

Assessment should reward the reasoning behind these decisions and the clarity with which students explain a recommendation’s limitations. A fluent explanation alone does not establish that a recommendation is appropriate.

Financial education has often been delivered before a consumer enters the marketplace, through a course, workshop or awareness programme. Yet many financial decisions happen in the moment, when someone is choosing a loan, making an investment or accepting a payment option.

Fintech students need to understand how education can be embedded within these financial journeys. Concise explanations, calculators, simulations and contextual prompts can help users examine a choice when the information is most relevant.

A lending platform could show how the total repayment amount changes across different loan periods. An investment tool could allow users to explore potential losses before committing money. Designing these features requires students to decide what information matters, when it should appear and how to explain it without overwhelming the user.

Students can test whether users can compare alternatives, recognise an obligation or explain a risk in their own words. They should also consider differences in financial knowledge, language, confidence and decision-making power.

This gives greater depth to the study of financial inclusion. Account ownership and product uptake reveal participation, but tell us less about people’s control over financial decisions. A woman may have a bank account while having limited influence over how its funds are used. Access creates an opportunity to participate; financial agency involves the ability to assess that opportunity and exercise a choice.

Students also need to learn how to evaluate whether the educational features they design improve users’ understanding and decisions.

The Kirkpatrick model offers a useful framework through its four levels of evaluation: reaction, learning, behaviour and results. Applied to financial education within a service, it encourages students to look beyond whether users liked an explanation or remembered its content. They should also ask whether users applied that understanding and whether the intended outcomes followed.

For example, can a borrower compare repayment options after using a calculator? Do they check the total cost before accepting an offer? Can they recognise when a product is unsuitable for their circumstances? These questions require evaluation beyond an immediate feedback form or knowledge test.

Students must also recognise the limits of what they can conclude. Financial decisions are influenced by income, urgency, available alternatives and other circumstances. Measuring outcomes requires attention to these factors, rather than assuming that every change in behaviour is caused by an educational feature.

Fintech education should bring technical capability, financial understanding and human behaviour into the same learning experience. Graduates need to build solutions, explain their purpose and assess their effects in practice.

(The article is written by Dr Jasmin B. Gupta, Professor of Practice in Fintech, University of Wollongong, India campus)

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