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To set up financial research lab in Chennai

Chennai , July 21

The Madras School of Economics (MSE) has partnered with GE Money, US, to set up the GE Money-MSE Decision Sciences and Financial Research Lab in its campus in Chennai.

The lab is designed to support and promote quantitative research in decision sciences to test and implement fresh ideas for GE's consumer finance businesses globally. The lab will be funded by GE Money and staffed by Ph.D. level research faculty and graduate students of MSE. An agreement to set up the lab was exchanged between Mr David Fogarty, Vice-President, Global Decision Science, GE Money, and Dr C. Rangarajan, Chairman, MSE.

Data Access

Dr Rangarajan, who is also the Chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, said the lab would help MSE faculty to solve real time problems on consumer finance. The agreement also allows access to data from GE to enable faculty and students of the MSE use it for research. The data could provide new insights on the behavioural pattern of customers, and faculty could publish research papers based on the data, he said.

According to Mr Fogarty, the lab was modelled after the success of GE's Edge Lab Research partnership with the University of Connecticut, US, and seeks to establish a collaborative environment, which promotes teamwork and emulates a real-world business setting. The lab aims at providing MSE a platform to facilitate research in finance and economics.

Unique Solutions

The lab will simultaneously leverage the expertise and research backgrounds of MSE faculty and students to promote unbiased perspective and strategic inputs into GE's consumer finance business and provide GE Money with unique solutions. A typical project model involves a combination of expertise from GE Money, academic literature and teaching, Six Sigma techniques and students' own creativity, he said.

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