Hosted by Alex and Conor.

Welcome to the UCD 2nd year Economics and Finance class.

Today, we are pleased to welcome Donal Rafferty, Director Product Development in Open Finance at Mastercard, Dublin.

Thank you for coming in to speak to us today, can you share a little of your own story?

· So, we’d like to start one of the ideas behind this series of talks. Do you think a finance professional’s working life will involve more or less interaction with dedicated development teams, IT or software engineers?

· Can you make a case for the value of knowing a bit about programming (e.g. python) for working in Finance.

· We are extremely interested in what you’ve learnt from experimenting with advanced aspects of LLMs, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, agentic knowledge graphs, and process automation. What do you imagine is going to be the impact on the Finance industry?

· On your website you used the phrase “embedded finance” a couple of times, can you explain the concept?

· About your website, you said it was VIBE coded. What motivated you and what did you learn about the process?

With the time left we’d like to open it to questions from the audience…

Any recommendations for books, podcasts, blogs??

(questions from audience)

Before we finish, is there anything further you'd like to add?

Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your thoughts with us today.

Notes and further reading: Key books, articles, blogs, podcasts, channels

• https://www.donalrafferty.com
• Explore Kaggle for inspiring examples of data analysis - https://www.kaggle.com
• Learn Python and Pandas! There are many resources available, for example, DataCamp - https://www.datacamp.com
• The Unicorn Project and The Phoenix Project. Two books by Gene Kim about tech projects and working in tech.
• Andrew Ng’s AI education platform - https://www.deeplearning.ai/ Register for a free account to get access to Andrew’s videos. (in fact Andrew Ng coined the term “Agentic AI”, to describe a trend in how people were building applications)

Acknowledgements

Music

Title: First Take

Artist: Debajyoti Biswas and Michael O'Neill

Source: mis.aup3

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Cover Art

Title: Complex collage

Artist: Allen Higgins

Source: DonalRafferty_Mastercard.pptx

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Podcast License

Design Talk (dot IE) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The license can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

By taking part you give permission for your voice to be recorded, for the recording to be edited, and for it to be posted and published as a podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the CITO Podcast.

This episode is a seminar by Quinn DuPont titled “Making New Money: How autonomous communities produce and govern cryptocurrencies.”

Paul Dylan-Ennis opens the session with a brief introduction after which Quinn presents an overview of his project, and Donncha Kavanagh makes some observations and invites reactions.

A Seminar by Quinn DuPont titled “Making New Money: How autonomous communities produce and govern cryptocurrencies.”

Decentralized cryptocurrencies are upending the foundations of economic power, challenging centuries of state and bank control over money. This research critically examines the rise of digital wildcat banking and its profound implications for economic sovereignty. Leveraging digital forensics, data science, and OSINT, this work reveals who actually produces and governs cryptocurrencies—and how their collective labor reshapes value and risk. It explores the forces behind decentralized money, the vulnerabilities these systems introduce, and the future role of state-issued currencies in an era of rapid monetary transformation.

Reflecting on the project Quinn notes:

"I've been working on this for well over a year now, and while it is still in development, the basic outline is complete. I make some pretty provocative claims, like arguing that global forces first emerging in the 1970s lead us inexorably to this point where the labour required to produce and govern new money has become involuted[1]. It’s a unique project that reveals how new money is made and details the implications for banks, nation states, and society. I also have some fun stories to share, like my effort to vampire attack Trump's WLFI token or my reverse engineering of the FBI's Operation Token Mirrors."

[1] Involution; the theory from Clifford Geertz where, in the original context, rice production becomes internally competitive and the processes require more labour without an increase in output - analogous to this story of technological development and precarious technological labour. I argue that the operational infrastructure of crypto expands to require more labour, despite no correlated increase in output. Thus, crypto overtakes national currencies not by meeting a market demand, but by accommodating excess labour supply.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our hosts for this episode are William Mugan and Grace Gunne from the BSc UCD Economics and Finance class.

Today, we are very pleased to welcome Jane Antova from IBM Consulting and colleagues Angela Stakelum and Bernadette Keating.

First, Jane, can you share a little of your own story and starting out in IBM?

So, what does a day in the life look like?

These days, do you find yourself needing more, or less interaction with technology specialists to get the job done?

Can you talk about typical sources of information and scale or size of datasets?

Can you talk about the tools used for modelling, economic simulations, machine learning, and use of AI?

Do you think that programming skills necessary or nice-to-have?

We have some time for questions from the audience…

Before we finish, is there anything further you'd like to add? (favourite pods, blogs, channels, books)

Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your thoughts with us today.

Notes, extra questions, and further reading:

IBM Skills Build - https://skillsbuild.org (free learning courses and resources)

PL/I – Programming Language One

Acknowledgements

Music

Title: First Take

Artist: Debajyoti Biswas and Michael O'Neill

Source: mis.aup3

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Cover Art

Title: Complex collage

Artist: Allen Higgins

Source: JaneAntova-IBM.pptx

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Podcast License

Design Talk (dot IE) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The license can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

By taking part you give permission for your voice to be recorded, for the recording to be edited, and for it to be posted and published as a podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.