The MSc Finance and Business Management is part of the MSc in Business and Management (MBM) Suite. This suite of courses is designed to help you become a knowledgeable and effective manager in a knowledge-based global economy. The UK Quality Assurance Agency benchmark statements that have guided the overall design of this course allows for some specialism within the area of Finance and this course is designed to enable you to gain a better understanding of management and the role finance issues have to play. The course is not designed to enable you to function as a finance specialist but to function with finance specialists. As a business manager you will need to understand and use financial information. It will be important to be able to interpret and present financial information to various stakeholders.
Business and Management as a study area is distinctive in that it is interdisciplinary and draws upon a wide range of soft and hard sciences. Thus, at post graduate level the study must be integrative, blending human behaviour with analytical approaches to solve problems and implement business and financial solutions through and with people. A further dimension is that Business and Management must also be treated as international in context to ensure relevance in the global economy.

The curriculum covers the wide range of areas that together make up Business and Management. The curriculum has a multi-disciplinary approach, but one that focuses on the key issues of problem solving and decision making. You are expected to develop a broad understanding at masters level of a wide range of contemporary issues affecting todays business. The approach will be not just multi-disciplinary but also international, and will enable critical thinking and creativity in analysis, synthesis and appraisal. As a member of the Finance pathway on the suite you will learn develop a unique insight into the use of financial information to solve problems. Furthermore, analysis and interpretation of financial information quantifies business processes and transactions focusing on the core objectives of corporations and the methodologies employed to achieve such aims.

The Benchmark Statement for Business and Management has noted the key knowledge and understanding content for such courses, and this course has used these requirements to inform the structure and content of the course. Furthermore the statement also notes the key skills for masters courses and these have informed the style of delivery and assessment.

The culmination of the course consists of a single 45 credit unit entitled, the Applied Management Project. It is this unit that captures the ethos of the course with its specific focus on the application of knowledge to inform the investigation of problems and move towards resolution of them. The Applied Management Project will allow you considerable autonomy to design their approaches to a given management problem. Your problem will be designed to allow you to explore issues of finance in the context of business.

The project starts in learning sets which will have the task of breaking a business / management problem into its constituent parts to enable analysis. You will divide responsibility for problem analysis amongst members of the learning set. Each student will then investigate the aspect of the problem over which they have ownership, and, using their own and shared data will produce a management report on their findings. The report will mix appropriate theory with practical investigation.