College of Business > About > Centers & Institutes > John L. Keeley Jr. Center for Financial Services

John L. Keeley Jr. Center for Financial Services

The financial services industry demands workers who have ever more specialized knowledge and skills, and whose training is relevant, up-to-date, theoretically sound and practically oriented. The industry also requires employees capable of servicing new and expanding markets that are increasingly diverse culturally and linguistically. As a hub of national and international financial services activity, and as a multicultural and multilingual city, Chicago is uniquely positioned, both in terms of the need and resources, to house a world-class John L. Keeley Jr. Center for Financial Services. This center will offer continuous and integrated training to the global financial services industry.

Traditionally, the financial services industry has hired graduates from a variety of undergraduate and graduate business, marketing and communications programs, and provided advanced training through educational and training institutions, including colleges, universities and executive schools. For the most part, financial institutions and their leaders have enjoyed little opportunity to directly guide the education and professional development delivered by academia to the industry. A number of institutions of higher education have established financial services centers that are primarily oriented toward academic research. These centers serve a distinct purpose, but do not always address both the practical and theoretical needs of the banking and financial services industry.

News

Congratulations to Gavin Fernandez and Huijun Zhang, our graduate students whose work was recently published on Seeking Alpha.

The title of the article is "The 'GREK' Alpha - A Game Theoretic Approach to Realizing Abnormal Gains." Our students analyzed the history of the Greek bailout and developed a trading strategy based on the Greece-focused exchange-traded fund GREK. The article has already been emailed thousands of people who get SA's ETFs & Portfolio Strategy daily.

Finance Forum

The center, in partnership with the Arditti Center for Risk Management, has launched the DePaul Finance Forum, a finance blog where which will feature working paper series, a published paper series for discussion and news analyses dealing with risk management. We also will host pre- and post-event discussions, as well as advertise upcoming center events. ​