When corporate finance executive and entrepreneur Alex Hubenthal ’13 senses change on the horizon, he doesn’t shy away — he leans in.
At 16, he opened his first brokerage account in 2008, with his grandmother’s help, during the Great Recession because he saw a market that had no place to go but up.
When cloud accounting platforms were just starting to become viable in the early 2010s, he was an early adopter, eventually building a firm that served clients remotely.
Now as artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes the business landscape, Hubenthal decided to embrace this latest inflection point by enrolling in UCF’s financial technology (fintech) master’s degree program.
“UCF is ready for every Knight who dares to lean in.”
“UCF doesn’t just educate you. It finds you. It amplifies who you are and prepares you to make a difference,” says Hubenthal, who is from Elon, North Carolina. “Sometimes I’m amazed that this small-town kid has ended up consulting with business leaders in boardrooms across the globe. Somewhere out there, another teenager is watching the world shift and feeling that pull. UCF is ready for every Knight who dares to lean in.”
Leading With a Spirit of Innovation
It’s Knights like Hubenthal who inspired Barry S. Miller ’95 to invest a transformational $50 million gift into the College of Business to further strengthen UCF’s reputation as a global leader in fintech, AI and business innovation.
A graduate of UCF’s finance program in the College of Business, Hubenthal initially came to UCF to study physics and engineering. But after witnessing the impact of the Great Recession on families, including his own, he switched to business and finance.
“I made it my mission to understand what happened, why it happened and how to help prevent it,” Hubenthal says.
Early in his career, Hubenthal worked in corporate finance, gaining hands-on experience and learning how established organizations manage their financial infrastructure.
In 2015, just two years after earning his bachelor’s degree, he co-founded a data analytics firm with fellow UCF graduates, bringing enterprise-grade big data and analytics services to local businesses at an accessible price point. That venture earned Hubenthal recognition as part of Business North Carolina magazine’s cover story on innovation in 2016.
Building on Success
He has since founded firms rooted in data analytics, accounting and finance — including his firm Bookscaping — started a financial literacy podcast to share his expertise with small businesses, and published a book, The Simple Fiscal Method: 17 Financial Lessons for Every Small Business Owner to Succeed in Life.
In 2022, he signed on as vice president of finance for ryco.io, an educational startup where he built and still leads the company’s financial strategy and operations.
He is currently beta testing an automated system for the company, which almost fully manages its payable function with safeguards, audit trails and authorizations built in. He envisions this empowering ryco.io to scale its financial operations.
Hubenthal wanted to fully immerse himself in this new era of business and tech, so he is turning to UCF’s fintech program to prepare him for what’s ahead.
“For me, the real world is the lab. And thanks to UCF, I’m just getting started.”
“The program put me in a room with nearly 30 students from four continents who felt like family within the first month,” Hubenthal says. “Just weeks ago, I built a portfolio optimization tool for my own retirement account — 1 million simulated market days and almost 4,000 years of data, solved by a supercomputer in under three seconds — using what I learned in this program.
“For me, the real world is the lab,” he continues. “And thanks to UCF, I’m just getting started.”
