Learning Corporate Finance – APICTA and Manthan Awards nominations

3 mins read

Learning Corporate Finance, a side project at Alchemy that we started to support our learning practice picked up two awards last week. Learning Corporate Finance (LCF) will be representing Pakistan in the e-learning category at the Asia Pacific ICT Awards being held in KL, Malaysia early next week. We were very lucky to be also nominated as the Pakistan country representative again in the e-learning category at the Digital Empowerment Foundation’s Manthan 2010 Awards in New Delhi.  Both wins come at the top of rising traffic and revenues on the LCF site.

Learning Corporate Finance is a warehouse of free online finance courses with a twist. We aim our offerings at treasury and computational finance professionals, risk managers, small business owners and business school students. Twenty short courses are already up and running at the site including topics on:

  1. Interest Rate Modeling, Calibrating CIR, HJM and BDT Models,
  2. Treasury Operations and Treasury products
  3. Derivative Pricing – Basic
  4. Derivative Pricing – Advance
  5. Fixed Income Derivatives
  6. SME Finance and Small Business Credit
  7. Credit Analysis and Credit Processes
  8. Asset Liability Management
  9. Corporate Finance and Ratio Analysis
  10. FAS 157 and Level 3 asset valuation
  11. Interest Rate Swaps and CCS valuation
  12. Range Accrual Notes, Commodity Linked Notes Valuation
  13. Interest Rate Caps and Floors Valuation
  14. Risk Management in the Petrochemical Industry

The twist is that we have also uploaded supporting pdf files and excel templates for most pricing and analysis courses. While the online content is free, the pdf’s and excel files are priced at the level of a Starbucks Café Mocha and a slightly up-market lunch at your nearest fine dining restaurant.

While I have learnt a bit about the traffic business in the last five months I still need a lot of help in getting word across about this resource. The original vision of my first online education business (in another life) was to share as much information as possible with as broad an audience as possible, preferably individuals who otherwise would not have access to these insights on account of personal, geographical and time limitations.

In one sense, we have been successful since traffic today originates from 160 countries and more than 2,500 cities covering about 18,000 unique visitors and 37,000 page views since launch.  On a monthly basis, four months after launch we are at 6,000 visitors and 12,000 page views and growing. Top page views keep on coming from the US, but most time spent and most page views per visitors are primarily coming from the developing world, from countries like Lesotho, Botswana, Bosnia, Yemen, Bolivia and Burma.

In terms of expectations since our focus has been on building this up as a resource for the developing world, the site is just text, graphics, pdfs and excel sheets to ensure low bandwidth delivery. But as traffic growth has shown in the last few months, with good content and supporting material even text and images are enough for niche topics.

Please come over and take a look. I would love to hear your feedback or even a friendly, long time, no see, note.  If you like what you see, please help us spread the word around by introducing Learning Corporate Finance to your Facebook, outlook address book and twitter network.  There is also a short survey that seeks your feedback and reactions about the blog that we can use as a collateral for the award pitches. If you have a few minutes, please look around the site and fill it in. It would be most appreciated.

Without your support Alchemy as well as Learning Corporate Finance would not be where they are today.