Global financial institution, FinTrU launches new trading room at Queen’s University Belfast

Global financial institution, FinTrU has launched a new financial trading room at the state-of-the-art Queen’s Business School (QBS) Student Hub, which recently opened its doors to over 3,000 students and staff.

Since 2017, FinTrU have sponsored the trading room which replicates New York and London trading environments, giving Belfast-based students access to 26 new Bloomberg terminals, other financial software, and preparing them for the world of work with first-hand experience of the fast-paced atmosphere of a real financial facility.

The FinTrU Trading Room is embedded into taught programmes at Queen’s Business School allowing students to relate real world news and market activity to economic and financial theory. The facility is also vital for supporting extra-curricular activities such as the CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) Research Challenge and Queen’s Student Managed Fund.

Professor M.N. Ravishankar, Dean and head of Queen’s Business School, said: “We are delighted to have an established and multi-faceted partnership with FinTrU. The new FinTrU Trading Room in the recently opened QBS Student Hub is a key facility in the building which has been designed to provide an enhanced social and educational experience for our students, staff, and the business community.

“The School prides itself on producing work-ready graduates and the FinTrU Trading Room provides an excellent opportunity for our students to gain first-hand experience of a trading environment, dealing in real-time equities, bonds, foreign exchange and derivative instruments.”

Darragh McCarthy, founder and CEO of FinTrU, explained: “We are proud to build on our relationship with Queen’s by continuing our support for the FinTrU Financial Trading Room facility at the new Queen’s Business School Student Hub. This partnership underlines our commitment both to the University and to the financial services sector in Northern Ireland. FinTrU has a longstanding partnership with the school and is delighted to continue this with offering Queen’s graduates the opportunity for employment through our leading FinTrU Graduate and Placement Programmes.

“In addition to the FinTrU Trading Room, we were delighted to contribute towards the establishment of the ‘Clinton Scholarship Fund’, unveiled at the historical 25th anniversary Good Friday Agreement event at Queen’s in April. The fund aims to remove financial barriers for students from Northern Ireland to undertake study opportunities in the USA – to strengthen our existing work to address underrepresentation in higher education.”

Siofra Healy, head of individual and corporate philanthropy at Queen’s, added: “FinTrU have been generously supporting the trading room at Queen’s Business School for the past number of years. Partnerships between businesses and universities are vital to share knowledge and to help develop a highly skilled and flexible workforce capable of working in competitive global markets.

“We are excited to launch the new FinTrU Trading Room at the innovative QBS Student Hub and look forward to continuing this important partnership in the future.”

FinTrU is a multi-award-winning employer with over 1,400 people across Belfast, Londonderry, London, Dublin, Letterkenny, Maastricht, New York and Porto.

The company’s wide-ranging expertise in KYC (Know Your Customer), Compliance, Risk and Legal enables the creation of Client Lifecycle Management solutions for leading global financial institutions.

FinTrU is a major employer in the Financial Services industry and actively recruits graduates from Queen’s recruitment events for their annual best-in-class Graduate and Placement Programmes. Over the past few years, FinTrU has been recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe’s Fastest Growing Companies and was named in the 2023 Sunday Times 100 Fastest Growing Companies in the UK. Recent national accolades include ‘Employer of the Year’, ‘Best Place to Work’, ‘Best Employee Development Programme’ and ‘Company of the Year’.