Located in Nihombashi, a center of finance and business, the Waseda Graduate School of Finance, Accounting and Law (Nihombashi Finance School: NFS) offers a new kind of MBA program aimed at training the professionals of tomorrow who will maintain Japan’s position as a worldwide leader in finance.
The NFS is Japan’s first true finance school. The school’s goal is to give its students a solid, well rounded education in finance, with a core in financial theory, and the knowledge of accounting, auditing, financial analysis, and financial law that is essential for finance-related projects in the corporate setting. This MBA program offers a broad education in finance and financial skills, rather than narrowly focusing on credit operations and financial policy.
In other words, the program’s goal is to train financial professions who can make a contribution to Japan’s market economy and the development of the society; to train finance specialists who can not only be successful in the finance industry, including such management roles as chief financial officer (CFO) and chief executive officer (CEO) with a strong finance background, but also find success in many other roles, including at trading, real estate, IT and other companies, as well as in the public sector and in think tanks, both in Japan and abroad.

We Are a Modern MBA School with a Enterprising, Far Seeing, and Proud Spirit

The students of the Waseda Graduate School of Finance, Accounting and Law come from many different backgrounds and situations. Some are Business person who want to improve their careers, others are candidates for upper management at their fi rms, while others come from yet different backgrounds. The students of the program come from many different industries and types of business, and have varied social standings. Some need expert knowledge of finance or financial markets for their work; some seek to switch careers to work at in the finance industry, or within their company’s finance department; some seek to raise their careers to a new level by obtaining an MBA. All of these students help each other to improve through hard work and friendly rivalry that go beyond the bounds of their differences.
In order to respond to the expectations of these students, the NFS provides an extremely high-quality education specialized in finance. In addition to talented full-time faculty members assigned specifi cally to each field – finance, economics, accounting, and law – we also invite many theorists and real-world experts from academia and business as guest lecturers, in order to impart new and fresh knowledge and information.
Our program is designed to enable our students to build their knowledge from a beginning level, while providing an educational and research environment that enables them to achieve a high level of advancement. We have organized a balanced curriculum that can meet the needs of newcomers to finance, as well as those wishing to brush up on the basics. We also offer pre-admittance preparatory classes in basic mathematics, bookkeeping, law, and other topics.

A Learning Environment Suited to the Diverse Needs of Working People

The NFS is a professional graduate school offering generally 2-year programs. Our target students are persons currently in the workforce who wish to improve their skills in order to capitalize on future opportunities. Although we offer a professional degree, however, our aim is not to teach or research in a single narrowly defined field, nor provide unbalanced skills.
People who are in the workforce will have already specialized to a certain degree. There are two types of continuing education: specialized education, which further enhances knowledge that has already been acquired; and balanced education, which teaches knowledge and methodology that the student had fared poorly at or not acquired before. The goal of the NFS is the second of these: to supplement fields where the student has insufficient knowledge or methodology, developing business leaders with a balanced skill set. It is not our goal to produce one-dimensional graduates with skills biased toward finance. Why? It is because superficial skills and techniques will eventually lose their value; they are not truly useful for creating new business opportunities or markets. The NFS’s goal is to produce many Business person with high-level yet balanced skills, in order to advance the Japanese market economy and contribute to the development of Japanese society.
Another feature of the NFS is our urban campus, which attracts people with diverse backgrounds who are already active in the workforce. This creates a stimulating environment of cross-pollination between different industries, and can go a step beyond as well, with a synergistic effect in which relationships formed on campus encourage job mobility. One’s classmates may in the future become fierce business rivals or valuable partners.
As human resources become increasingly mobile, the MBA is becoming a formidable tool as proof of one’s knowledge, skills, process, and success. We are committed to helping our graduates turn the “enterprising spirit” they learned at Waseda University as a step up to a career that can bring them greater satisfaction.

From the Basics to Advanced Topics: A Flexible and Well Rounded Curriculum

The NFS curriculum is designed to enable a fl exible and well rounded course of study, tailored to each student’s motivations for studying, research goals, intellectual interests, and more.
For example, when students are studying finance seriously for the first time, we start by giving them a grounding in the basics, through courses in basic and core subjects. After this, students are able to select courses in specialized subjects in accordance with their interests. Students coming from a legal background – either through a college major or work in a legal department – begin by studying financial theory and accounting from the basics, taking specialized courses in law to fill in gaps in their knowledge, and overcoming their weak areas. Similarly, students who majored in commerce or business administration and have knowledge of basic financial theory and accounting or who have experience working in the field can choose from a wide selection of specialized courses in finance, filling in the gaps in their knowledge, while at the same time learning the basics of law and other subjects. A wide selection of classes is also available to students who wish to carry out research in a specialized field, such as financial engineering or real-estate finance. Each field offers “topics” classes which give students an opportunity to come in contact with theory and practice at a more advanced and sophisticated level.
In their first year of study, students are required to take Fundamental Finance Courses, such as foundations of financial theory, foundations of economics, and mathematical analysis, which is essential for an understanding of finance. They are also required to take Core Finance Courses, increasing the depth of their knowledge of corporate finance and investment. Students are also able to take elective courses in finance, economics, accounting, law, and other subjects in accordance with their individual goals and interests. In their final year of study, students build on the analysis techniques and basic knowledge acquired through the required and elective courses from their first year mentioned above. They take elective courses on specialized subjects in the Finance Courses, Accounting Courses, Economics Courses, Law Courses, General Courses, and Seminars groups, as well as Research Reports, in order to achieve their personal targets. Through their second-year studies, they construct their Finance MBA according to their career visions.

Balanced Course Offerings from Theory to Practice

The NFS offers a balanced curriculum, with financial theory and practice as its core and economics as its base, supported by studies in accounting and law, and supplemented and rounded with related knowledge.
The curriculum is designed and organized to provide a well rounded set of skills, founded on the skills required to carry out actual financerelated projects. This is a unique feature of our curriculum that is not to be found at traditional postgraduate (Master’s Program) programs with more compartmentalized educational systems.
Our system provides a balanced education, with a core of financial theory and practice, and knowledge of such related areas as accounting, auditing, financial analysis, and finance law. Our students are thus able to achieve a high level of education and carry out effective research, from the basics of finance to advanced topics.
For example, people with expertise in investment theory will play a key role in securities investment projects. People with expertise in corporate finance theory will likewise play a key role in new financing projects, M&As, and corporate restructuring. Meanwhile, experts at using derivative modeling and other techniques from financial engineering will be central to projects to develop financial products. The above individuals will form the cores of project teams consisting of experts in law, taxes, and accounting (e.g. attorneys at law, tax attorneys, and CPAs).
Our goal is to give our graduates a balanced skill set enabling them to manage actual financial projects envisioning this kind of project process. There are many different kinds of finance projects. There is therefore a rapidly growing need for well rounded financial knowledge and skills at divisions of banks, insurance companies, securities firms, and other financial institutions involved in the market, as well as nonfinancial corporations and other organizations that are expanding their financial activities at their own expense.
At the NFS, our goal is provide a fl exible and well rounded curriculum able to rapidly adapt to these business situations. In so doing, we aim to give our students the expertise suited to a job as a finance project manager, and systematically teach the essential knowledge and skills for work in the field of finance, enabling them to build their own goals and career plans, and giving them the high level of professional ability demanded in today’s world of market-driven finance. The speed of internationalization today is also astounding, and we focus on giving our students the international awareness and skills to succeed in today’s world of global finance. One example of our efforts in this area is providing more discussion-oriented lectures, to which we invite global players in the finance industry.

Majors	Degrees (Field of Specialization)
Finance, Accounting and Law	MBA