2029 Fintech Academy - Greenwood Project Scholar Program

Job description

**About The Greenwood Project** At Greenwood Project, we open doors in financial services for undergraduate freshmen. We give our scholars three things: social capital, the network that comes from knowing people inside the industry. Academic and technical capital, the training the work actually requires. And aspirational capital, the belief that the seat belongs to you. This is not a workshop series. Scholars commit to twelve months of training, deliver real work on real deadlines, and finish knowing whether this industry is for them. Many go on to internships and full time offers at our partner firms. All of them leave with a network they did not have before. **The Fintech Academy** This academy trains the analytical and operational foundation underneath financial services: how markets are structured, how money actually moves through systems, where it breaks, and what the rules require. Financial services now hires analysts, operators, and risk professionals in the same numbers it hires traditional finance roles, and those jobs are open to people who did not start out in finance. **Where this training leads** These are the roles this academy prepares you for, and they hire sophomores and juniors in real numbers. Each one maps directly to what you will study. **• Fintech product and operations analysis.** Working alongside product and operations teams to find what is broken, decide what matters most, and make the case for fixing it. This is the role our capstone puts you in. **•** **Trading operations.** Everything that has to happen after a trade is agreed. Confirming it, clearing and settling it, making sure the right money and securities land in the right accounts, and finding the break when they do not. Trading desks cannot function without this, and it is one of the largest entry points into a firm. **• Operations more broadly.** The rest of the machinery: onboarding clients, moving payments, reconciling accounts, handling corporate actions. When operations fails, it is expensive and public. **• Risk, compliance, and fraud.** Figuring out what could go wrong, how likely it is, and how much it would cost. This includes fraud detection and the checks that confirm who a firm is doing business with. **Program Overview** We are recruiting 100 scholars into the Fintech Academy for the 2029 cohort. Across all three Greenwood academies we will select 325. You are eligible if you are currently a freshman graduating in 2030. We call this the 2029 cohort because Summer 2029 is the internship you are working toward. **When What happens** - **October 2026 to June 2027:** Rolling admissions. Decisions every month. November is the priority round. - **July 2027:** Academy begins. - **July 2027 to June 2028:** Twelve months of training, from the summer after freshman year through your sophomore year. - **Fall 2028:** Junior year internship recruiting season. Greenwood supports you through interviews. - **Summer 2029:** The goal: a 10 week internship with a partner firm, the summer after your junior year. - **Spring 2030:** You graduate. **How rolling admissions works** We review applications and make decisions every month from October 2026 through June 2027. You will hear back within 4 weeks of the round your application lands in. Seats fill as we go, so the earliest rounds have the most of them open. Apply early. **You get one application** You submit one application for this cohort. Not one per academy, and not one per round. Our Talent & Recruitment team may move you to a different academy than the one you selected if your answers point somewhere else, so you do not need to get that choice perfect. **Every application gets one of three outcomes:** - **Accepted.** You are in. - **Deferred.** We want to see more before we decide, usually your next term of grades. Your application carries forward automatically and you do not need to submit anything new. You will hear from us about two weeks before the next round of decisions, and again every month until we decide. You will not sit in silence. - **Declined.** Final for this cycle. Because this program only admits freshmen, we cannot reconsider you in a later round. Deferral is the reason you can apply in an early round without taking a risk. If we are not ready to decide, we hold your application. We will not turn you away for applying before your first semester was finished. Deadlines in this process are real. Once you apply, we will ask you for things on a schedule: transcripts, forms, sometimes an interview time. If you miss those deadlines, your application is declined rather than delayed. We hold this line because the program itself runs on deadlines, and how you handle ours tells us how you will handle those. **Please read this carefully:** Internship placements are not guaranteed. Greenwood trains you, advocates for you, and puts you in front of our partner firms. Those firms make their own hiring decisions. What we guarantee is the preparation, the network, and honest feedback. The offer is something you earn. **What You'll Study** No prior finance or technical experience is required. Real effort is. Each module below builds on the one before it, and you will be working with real deadlines throughout. - **Basic Market Structure.** OTC versus exchange systems, liquidity fundamentals, and the key elements of market structure. OTC means over the counter, where a trade happens directly between two parties instead of on a public exchange. Liquidity is how easily something can be bought or sold without moving its price. - **Inside the FinTech Stack.** [DESCRIPTION NEEDED. Awaiting context from team.] - **Data-Driven Decision Making.** Pre-trade, execution, and post-trade processes, including clearing, settlement, and reconciliation. This is the full life of a trade, from the decision to buy through to confirming that the money and the security actually changed hands. - **Regulation & Risk.** Fraud detection, KYC and AML, data privacy, and consumer protection. KYC means know your customer and AML means anti money laundering, the checks a firm runs to confirm who it is doing business with and where the money came from. **Capstone: AI-Powered Customer Insights Lab:** Scholars act as members of a fintech product or operations team, analyzing mock customer feedback to identify pain points, prioritize issues, and present strategic recommendations to a simulated leadership audience. **Building AI Fluency** Fintech is where AI stopped being a pilot project. In a 2026 Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance survey, 21 percent of financial services firms already had AI agents running in production and 52 percent were piloting them. Agents are doing real work today in underwriting, fraud detection, compliance, and operations. That means two things for you. The entry level work that used to be manual is going away. And someone has to test, monitor, and be accountable for the systems doing it instead. That someone is who we are training you to be. Hands on with real tools. You will not just learn concepts. You will build working skill with the software and AI tools used on the job. Each Greenwood academy trains a different technical toolset, chosen to match the roles that academy actually feeds, so what you build here is specific to the operations, risk, and product side of financial technology rather than a general overview. **The judgment we are after:** knowing what should be automated, what should not, and who is responsible when an automated system gets it wrong. Firms are hiring for that question right now and struggling to fill the seats.