with Mastercard's
Director of Finance
for North America
6 JUL 2022 - 22 AUG 2022
Duration:
7 WEEKS
MONDAYS & WEDNESDAYS
5 PM PST / 8 PM EST
Mastercard's Director of Finance for North American markets wants to teach you how to leverage the fundamentals of corporate finance to advance your business interests — and your career.
Jennifer Clarke brings simplicity to complex financial metrics through real-world business cases, practice labs, and mock analyses.
Do you see yourself below?
Then this course is for you.
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FINANCE PROFESSIONAL.
Enhance your corporate expertise for the charged financial playing field.
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GENERAL MANAGER.
Learn to accurately predict revenue and foresee risk as you prepare to take the next big step in your career.
Demystify corporate finance
Enhance your career with the financial expertise to confidently plan and execute budgets for projects, departments, or for participating in decision making on a senior level.
Mastercard Director of Finance Jennifer Clarke combines 15 years of experience in profit management at Fortune 500 companies to teach you how to engage on today's fluid financial playing field. By the end of this course, you'll be competent to interpret financial statements and communicate figures to investors, managers, and other stakeholders.
What you'll learn
You'll come away from this course with a full toolset to advocate for your projects and budgets to key financial decision makers. Jennifer will help you build a functional knowledge of key topics in corporate finance needed to understand investing and financing decisions in your organization:
- Evaluating investment projects and companies
- Profit and loss statements (P&L) and how to manage them in a business unit of a company
- Leveraging conventional financial instruments (stocks and bonds) and alternative ones (commodities, forwards, and options) to bring value to corporations
- Innovations like cryptocurrencies and their impact on corporate economics
- Considerations for investment and financing decisions
- Market disruptors and real-world wildcards
business case
What's the return on your project's investment? You'll practice answering this for decision-makers over 6 weeks as you develop a strong business case. Jen will help you gauge your strengths and areas for improvement.
financial compass
It's the hard truth of business: not having "finance" in your job title doesn't mean you don't have finance in your job. This course will teach you the fundamentals of corporate finance needed to make the business case for your products or budgets to financial decision-makers. You'll also learn about innovations in the finance world like crypto assets, and how to separate sound potential from hype.
How many videos, talks, and books are still taking up real estate on your "I should learn that" list? This course is different. Live lessons and labs, graded assignments, office hours, and a final project help you assimilate new information quickly and immediately leverage it in your professional role.
CLARKE LinkedIn Profile
- MasterCard's Director of Finance in the North America region and Services Business Partner
- Forecasts and drives millions of dollars in revenue to multinational, publicly traded corporations
- Contributes 15+ years of corporate finance expertise to support industries including pharmaceutical, payments, and hedge funds
- Charterholder and member of the CFA Institute, the global industry standard for assets management
- Dedicated fan of podcasts and the New York Giants
COURSE INTRODUCTION
The course starts off by diving into the roles on a typical finance team and the functions they perform. Jennifer will prototype the corporate finance organizational structure, and discuss how this model can differ between organizations. Then, you'll be introduced to the publicly traded company you'll analyze throughout the course.
- Why do businesses need corporate finance?
- What types of corporate finance tasks are out there?
- How do corporate financial decisions get made?
- What are the main objectives of the CFO?
Assignment #01: Consider the publicly traded company introduced today. Complete the following questions to understand the company’s competitive positioning in the market:
- Determine the ticker symbol. Look up the company’s financial disclosures on sec.gov or their website
- List out the main business areas of the company
- Who are the company’s competitors?
- What are the biggest challenges?
- What are your initial views on this company being a sound investment?
- Who are the company’s customers?
- What are critical risks facing the company?
Financial statements are the key references to assess the viability of a corporation. Jennifer will walk you through the components of a financial statement — the balance sheet and the income statement — using a current company's real financial statements. You'll learn simple but essential formulas to break down and understand the balance sheet.
- Assembling and analyzing the balance sheet
- Income sheet vs. balance sheet
- Liquidity and financial leverage
- Accounting value vs. market value
- Balance sheet’s primary formula: Assets = Liabilities + Equity
- Case study: Zoom’s revenue on the pandemic boost
This class is dedicated to one of the most important parts of financial statements — cash flow, the structure of a cash flow statement, the components of cash flow, and how they differ from one another. What are the sources and uses of cash and methods of calculating cash flow?
- How companies access funding via capital markets
- Importance of capital markets for maintaining liquidity
- Company credit ratings and the limitations
- Case study: A retailer and an airline in lockdown
Assignment #02: You will receive the case company’s three main financial statements and be asked to calculate certain financial ratios. Use the financial statements to calculate ratios and metrics of the company over time.
The notion of "time is money" is a very real one in corporate finance. In this class, you'll learn how to employ the concept of the time value of money (TVM) and other key metrics in valuation. You'll learn how to calculate these metrics to accurately gauge a company's value against its competitors.
- Calculating TVM
- Factoring for input/assumption bias
- Discount rates: Required rate of return (RRR), risk, and assessing stock volatility with beta
- "Weighted cost of capital" (WACC) and evaluating investments
- How to calculate WACC
Assignment #03: Use the CAPM formula to calculate the Cost of Equity and answer the questions provided by Jennifer.
In this class, Jennifer will cover the most important concepts and ideas of bond valuation methodologies and explain how bond yields and interest rates reflect interest rate risk, lack of liquidity, and taxability.
- Real vs. nominal interest rates
- How corporate bond issuance has changed since 2008
- Investment grade bonds vs. junk bonds
- What is the average credit rating of a corporate bond?
- Case study: An automotive legend gets lowered to junk bond rating
Assignment #04: The company is getting ready to launch a new product in the beginning of the year and needs to decide how many versions to release. Help inform their decision by completing the project valuation.
In this class, you will put together a capital investments request to a company's finance team. Then, Jennifer will walk you through how to build a basic financial model, drawing on what you've learned so far. The output of this financial model will tell us whether this project is worth investing in and if it will generate sufficient cash flow to recover its initial cost.
- Review: PV, IRR, time-to-break-even
- Scenario testing: How different assumptions impact the business case NPV, IRR, etc.
- Material nonpublic information: What you need to know
- What's insider trading?
- Case study: Jeffrey Skillings and the Cuban Insider Trading Case
You'll learn how to build a reliable budget using specific metrics and tools. Jen will explain the difference between a budget versus a forecast, what things to consider when building a budget for revenue vs expenses, and how to present the budget to executives.
- Sample budgeting process
- Growth targets
- Ground-up vs. top-down builds
- Visually presenting budgets with the Think-Cell application
Assignment #05: You will be provided budget and forecast information for a selling branch in your company and asked to answer questions about revenue performance and expense management.
Is it possible for business professionals to manage their own P&L? Absolutely, and in this class, you'll learn what to include on yours and how to manage it.
- Forecasting: What, why, and how
- Risk and opportunity-adjusted forecasts
- Impact of revenue and expenses cadence for managing quarterly earnings
- Communicating forecast uncertainty
- Accounting treatment for recognizing revenue and expenses
You may have heard that dividends are a major cash outlay for many corporations, and in this class, you'll find out why that is. You'll learn how to keep the investment in cash low while keeping the firm operating effectively, what flotation is, the reasons for holding cash, as well as the reasons to NOT hold excess idle cash.
- What happens when a company increases vs. reduces its dividend? What signal does it send to Wall Street?
- What's the typical dividend for growth companies vs. value/mature companies?
- What's the impact of corporate share repurchases on dividends and overall total cash returned to shareholders?
- Case study: The seductive power of IBM's high dividend
Assignment #06: Look up what the company’s current dividend is and its dividend yield. Compare it to other major companies and/or competitors. Next, research the history of the case company’s dividend and how its strategy has changed over time.
In this class, you'll step beyond Wall Street to dig into the stock market's purpose and how it functions. You'll learn the basic approaches to stock valuation and the upcoming innovations in the stock market.
- Features of stock markets and the impact of technology
- Who are the major players in the stock market?
- Stock market crashes and what happened in 2020
- Key equity metrics and how they moved during the above periods
- Efficient markets vs. exploiting market inefficiencies
- Case study: Why did Dell go private?
Today's class focuses on additional financial instruments that corporations may trade, including commodities, forwards, and options markets. These instruments have different structures than stocks and bonds and unique use cases. Jennifer will present several of these use cases and then walk through valuing a stock call.
- Common financial instruments: Overview, features, and uses
- What are the key factors in the valuation of each instrument?
- How do they differ from stocks and bonds in a portfolio?
- How do corporations use options, forwards, and commodities in their business?
- Practice: Stock call valuation
- Use case: How to value a forward and an option
Assignment #07: Use a Black-Sholes option pricing calculator online to calculate the value of various options of the case company. Comment on the differences based on changes in inputs.
Crypto assets have gained a lot of traction in financial markets, but do they meet the criteria of true "currencies"? In this class, Jennifer will outline the influence of cryptocurrencies and assets on the financial system and their associated risks and measurement issues. Then, you'll turn to how crypto-assets affect the stability and efficiency of the financial system and the broader economy.
- Blockchain technology: What it is and uses beyond crypto
- Cryptocurrency: Commodity or currency?
- NFTs
- Sovereign-backed coins
- Case study: Bitcoin's crypto supremacy and the surprising rise of Dogecoin
Innovations in the finance system stretch far beyond crypto. Today, Jennifer will introduce some of these new financial and investment products and discuss how they have revolutionized the financial system.
- Crowdfunding
- Fintechs
- Artificial Intelligence
- Mobile banking, open banking
- Robinhood and other disruptive players in the equity markets
- Case study: WeWork and SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Company)
What aspects of finance will be most important to your role? With this question in mind, you will prepare to put your learning into life with a review of the most salient course takeaways. Jennifer will also devote attention to how the pandemic has influenced the stock market throughout the past year.
- Review: What you've learned
- Sector/industry performance vs. overall market
This 4-week project is your chance to work on a real-world deliverable, with personal feedback from a corporate finance expert.
Your case company is considering a new project and it's your job to create the business case. Use inputs provided by Jen to build a discounted cash flow analysis and decide whether the project is worthwhile. Next, complete various scenario and sensitivity testing to better understand the most sensitive variables in the model. Share your findings in a slide presentation for stakeholders.
What our students say
"It's giving me a great view into the Corporate Finance world"
"Jennifer's ability to relate class learnings to current real-world events is amazing - It makes it a lot easier to learn and keeps it interesting as we are learning about what we are seeing in the world today."
"I like the blocks of topics; they all mingle with each other, and give you a high level of a myriad of topics. I feel like knowing something is possible is half the battle so even touching on a topic at a high level will add to anyone's knowledge base."
"It is immediately relevant, applicable, and practical."
"Jennifer is a great instructor. Extremely knowledgeable and passionate about the subject matter. She is incredibly approachable and practical."
"The office hours are great! Jennifer is able to take some time and re-explain things which is so helpful! I also LOVE how she starts off each class with whats going on in the world and how its effecting things!"
"The course stands by out by providing the bigger picture of Finance, a topic so broad and challenging yet simplified here for the students."