Finance courses have experienced a rapid growth in student numbers over the last decade. Several new finance degrees have been launched in recent years including the Bachelor of Finance at the University of Dundee and the Bachelor of Finance at Manchester; more are planned in the near future (such as the Bachelor of Finance at Aberdeen). Lecturers who run these courses are now faced with a problem common to many disciplines - how to maintain and enhance educational standards for a growing student population within the constraints of strictly limited resources. Suitably qualified staff are difficult to find given the high opportunity cost of the large salaries on offer from financial institutions. In addition, realistic data for teaching purposes are difficult to employ because of the costs of obtaining such data from industry and the lack of appropriate tools for students to analyse this information; financial institutions are not keen to provide cheap copies of their computer software because this provision may diminish any competitive advantage which this software supplies. The project team believed that graduates entering the world of finance would benefit from experience of important financial software used by industry and sought to offer this experience to them.

The Finesse project (FINance Education in a Scalable Software Environment) addresses these problems by the construction of a networked, computer-based environment which includes a Portfolio Management Facility. A limited manual version of a portfolio management game has been used by staff at the University of Dundee for a number of years to illustrate various portfolio management strategies to undergraduate students by allowing them to set up and manage their own portfolio of equities. The Finesse Portfolio Management Facility has substantially improved on this manual version of the game and provides stronger links to a number of courses. This paper briefly describes the novel educational courseware which has been produced, and highlights some of the technologies used in its development and provision.