The Consumer Payments & Finance Academy offered classroom-style lectures on some of the fundamentals of the financial services market, including the evolution of money and payment systems, the economics of consumer credit, and the technologies developed to ensure data privacy and security. The Ninth Annual Financial Services Symposium was a seminar featuring panel discussions on new and evolving challenges in the financial services industry – including fin-tech best practices, open source banking technologies, the growing use of artificial intelligence in the financial services sector, data protection and cyber-security, and cross-border data flows. Participants toured a state of the art Visa data center, led by the company’s top cyber-security practitioners. This was a unique opportunity to see how the world’s largest retail payment network securely processes hundreds of millions of transactions per day.

The programs were held from Sunday, 31 March through Thursday, 4 April 2019 at George Mason University (Arlington, Virginia campus), just outside Washington, DC. These educational programs are designed to help government officials better understand the economics and technology underlying global consumer payment and consumer credit systems, data security and privacy tools, and the regulatory systems that protect consumers while encouraging competition, choice, and innovation in national and global financial markets.