IE Business School has further consolidated its position as No. 2 school worldwide in finance according to the latest ranking of Masters in Finance published by Financial Times.
IE achieved this result for the second year running in the pre-experience category with its full-time English-taught Master in Finance, aimed at young professionals with an international profile. The student body of IE’s Master in Finance comprises 95% international students from 26 countries, with an average GMAT score of 680. They will complete the program at the end of this month to start work in international companies that include Morgan Stanley, Merril Lynch, Jefferies, Barclays Capital and Rothschild. The Master is the first program in Spain to be made a CFA (Chartered Financial Advisor) program partner, the leading international endorsement for financial analysts.
“The financial sector needs specialized profiles with an international focus,” says Ignacio de la Torre, Director of Masters in Finance at IE Business School. “IE’s finance programs equips students with this type of education, and our graduates go on to work in firms like Goldman Sachs, UBS, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and Nomura, and in emerging economies that offer enormous potential given the accelerated development of their capital markets”.
The Master in Finance forms part of IE Business School’s Masters in Finance portfolio, along with the School’s Master in Advanced Finance, Executive Master in Financial Management, Executive Master in Finance bi-weekly, and the new Global Master in Finance, a blended program with residential periods in Madrid and London. The five programs offer a selection of 200 subjects in fields like non-banking finance, Islamic finance and microfinance, making the program portfolio unique in the market. Students share a faculty made up of 80 finance professors, and a pool of more than 60 electives with up-to-the-minute program content in fields like raw materials, distress investments, mergers and acquisitions, and private equity. The methodology employed by IE’s Masters in Finance is eminently practical, employing management education tools like investment competitions, portfolio management simulation in real-time using Bloomberg platform Factset, or Matlab, which analyzes fixed income. Students also have one of Spain’s most complete trading rooms at their disposal, with more than 10 Bloomberg terminals connected to the market.
Students can round off their learning experience in New York, visiting investment banks and hedge funds, holding meetings with financial executives, and gaining a deep insight into how Wall Street works. They also get the opportunity to take part in corporate social responsibility projects such as the initiative launched recently in Ghana by NGO Financieros sin Fronteras, aimed at gauging the impact of microfinance institutions on the eradication of poverty. In the field of research IE Business School’s Center for Islamic Finance has ongoing agreements with institutions that include King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia, while IE experts contribute regularly to academic journals like The Journal of Finance.
The Financial Times ranking of Masters in Finance comprises the categories of pre-experience and post-experience programs. It is based on 18 criteria that include the degree of internationalization of the school and its programs, fulfillment of students’ expectations, graduate salaries, the percentage of international faculty and students, the percentage of women faculty and students, the percentage of professors that hold doctorates, and research levels.
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