Prof. Branko Urošević on the arc from founding IMQF in 2001 to launching MCF at Union University in 2021 — and what comes next.
When I founded IMQF in 2001, the question was simple: could we teach computational finance at international standards in Belgrade? Two decades later, the question is different. Computational finance has fused with programming, data science, and AI — and the institutions that produce the talent need to fuse those skills too.
What changed
MCF, launched in 2021 at the School of Computing of Union University, is what IMQF needed to become. The coursework is built around the integration: every week, students are simultaneously sharpening their Python and R, deepening their finance, and putting both into machine learning and applied AI problems on real datasets.
The network we built through IMQF — alumni now at JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, the Austrian National Bank, and dozens of regional firms — is the foundation MCF builds on. The advisory board members from those institutions return each year to keep the curriculum honest. The hiring partnerships that emerged organically over twenty years are now formalised.
Where this goes next
The next phase is into outcomes. We are publishing cohort statistics, employment outcomes, and salary distributions so that prospective students can see what their two semesters at MCF translate into. That work is underway.
The integrative thinking is the moat. We're not training people to write Python scripts for finance — we're training people who think in code AND markets simultaneously.