Quant Guide 2017: Maharishi University of Information Technology

School of Financial Engineering, Noida, India

Master of Financial Engineering | metrics table at end of article

This degree is the inaugural offering from India’s first school of financial engineering, set up by the MUIT with the Indian Institute of Quantitative Finance, and due to open its doors in August 2017. 

The master’s programme will last two years and will also include a three-month-long internship. The first two batches of students will be 30-strong; however, the university plans to double the size of the intake in future.

“The programme is comprehensive in terms of theory as well as programming – C++, R, Python, financial labs – there’s a lot of focus on practice,” says Nitish Mukherjee, the chief administrative officer and course coordinator of the degree. “When our students come out of university they will be absolutely ready to get plugged into the industry.” 

Since some potential employers have moved to R and Python and some are still using C++, the programme administrators decided to make all three languages compulsory.

Mukherjee is optimistic about the future of the quant profession in India and believes that the new programme at MUIT will help the Indian job market respond to the changed needs and the increased demand for Indian-based quants from the industry.

“Over the past seven years the demand for these kind of profiles in India has increased. A lot of jobs – mainly in banks, but also financial analytics firms – have moved to India from Europe, the US and the Asia-Pacific region,” he says.

The decline in exotic derivatives trading globally hasn’t affected the demand in India for people with a solid quant background. “Globally, exotic product trading has decreased, but here the demand for quants in exotics desks has seen an increase,” Mukherjee says.

The programme’s organisers focus on tailoring its contents to the needs of the financial sector. Mukherjee stresses the faculty’s strong links with the industry: “We have been in quant finance modelling for the last 20 years or so. The programme was established by the people that are working in the industry, and we intend to deliver what’s required for the industry”. 

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