Van Phuc (Phil) Nguyen,Ph.D.

Senior Lecturer, Applied Finance and Fintech, Western Sydney University

On my first day with a new class, I tell them the truth. I am not smarter than you. I have studied a few years longer and lived a few years longer, so I have simply seen more of the map. The distance between us is time, not talent, and you will close it faster than you think.

When you are starting out, finance arrives in fragments. Each topic sits alone inside a course, each course sits alone inside the degree, and nothing seems to connect to anything else. The real gift of those extra years, of the master’s and the doctorate, was never cleverness. It was the overview, the ability to finally see how one idea reaches across to the next, until the whole field holds together as a single picture.

I built these atlases so you would not have to wait years for that view. I wanted to hand you my vantage point on your first day, not your last. See the connections now, while you are still at university, and carry the whole map with you for the rest of your career.

Stand on my shoulders. See how it all connects.

I teach across PhD, Master, and undergraduate programs in Vietnam, New Zealand, and the Netherlands. My classes are anchored in live markets rather than textbook abstractions. We work with instruments traded on the ASX and SGX, BBSW-linked swaps, and the CBDC pilots now moving from theory into practice, so students leave able to open a real market report and read, line by line, the instruments in play.

My research sits where corporate finance meets enterprise risk, geopolitical risk, and CBDC adoption. Fifteen publications since 2022, thirteen of them in SSCI-indexed journals including Annals of Operations Research, World Economy, Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, and Resources Policy. A 2022 paper in the Scottish Journal of Political Economy ranked among that journal's most-cited across 2022 and 2023.

I also build open educational resources that teach finance as a connected whole, so students see how ideas reinforce one another instead of memorising formulas in isolation. The Derivatives Atlas was the first; there are now six course atlases, woven together by Common Threads, a map of the ideas they share, all free to explore and remix under CC BY-NC.