Master in Finance

ESSEC’s Master in Finance is a pre-experience specialist finance master’s, ranked #4 worldwide in the Financial Times Masters in Finance 2025 on ESSEC’s own statement of the result.¹ It is a distinct programme from the Grande École Master in Management, which is ranked separately at #10 in the FT Masters in Management 2025: where the MiM is a broad generalist degree, the Master in Finance runs three specialist tracks and admits on a required management test.

Overview

The programme is taught in English on either the Paris-Cergy or the Singapore campus, with the intake at the end of August.¹ ² Its length is decided by your previous degree rather than by preference: a three-year bachelor’s or a French Licence 3 takes the two-year route (M1 + M2), while a four-year bachelor’s or an existing master’s takes the one-year route (M2 only).² The degree is accredited as a Master by the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation.²

Curriculum

Students choose one of three tracks — Corporate Finance, Financial Markets, or FinTech & Analytics.¹ The programme is full-time and intensive, and ESSEC builds two international study trips into it: one to London, and a second to either New York or Hong Kong.² A certificate in Energy and Commodities is offered alongside the core curriculum, and each year of the programme includes an internship.²

Class Profile

ESSEC describes a typical class profile rather than publishing a cohort size, and no student count for this programme is published — so none is stated here. Of that typical class, 65% hold degrees in economics, business or finance and 35% in engineering or science, 47% are non-French, 30% are women, and the average age is 24.² ESSEC names the Americas, Belgium, China, India, Italy, France, Germany, Morocco, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain and the United Kingdom among the countries represented.

Application & Deadlines

A management test is required and ESSEC publishes no minimum score for any of them — but the four accepted tests are not interchangeable, and the difference decides when you have to sit one.¹ The GMAT (including GMAT Online and GMAT Focus Edition) and the GRE are valid for five years; TAGE-MAGE for two; and the CAT for one year and only for Indian applicants, which is a restriction worth knowing before you plan an application around a score you already hold.¹ That the test is required at all is a meaningfully different bar from HEC’s Master in International Finance, where it is optional.

English proficiency carries hard minimums — TOEFL iBT 95 (or 5/6), IELTS Academic 6.5, Cambridge B2 First 175, or TOEIC 850, none more than two years old at the deadline of the round you apply in.¹ But there is a waiver, and it is an unusually generous one: ESSEC does not require the English test at all from an applicant who has spent at least three years in a higher-education programme completely taught in English, provided you supply an official certificate stating that the medium of instruction was English.¹ ESSEC attaches no condition about which country that degree was taken in — which makes it a materially wider door than the common form of the same clause, which grants the waiver only for a degree taken in a majority English-speaking country and so excludes most English-medium universities in South Asia and Africa.

The file also requires transcripts, a CV, a motivation letter, two references, an identity document and a photograph, and the application costs €120, non-refundable; ESSEC links a separate check for whether you are exempt from that fee but does not publish the rule on this page.¹ You may submit one application per programme per academic year, and two in total, and your campus and track choices are final once you submit.¹

ESSEC’s Admissions Calendar is headed “For 2027 Intake”, lists four rounds, and dates none of them — every deadline and results cell read TBD when this profile was re-checked on 9 September 2026, while the paragraph beneath it still tells applicants that “the deadlines to submit your application are listed in the table above.”¹ That is a published silence rather than a missing page: what ESSEC has fixed is the shape of the calendar — four rounds, applications due by 12 noon, Paris time, and admission results promised “no later than” a stated date — and not yet the dates themselves. So no dates are given here rather than guessed. Check ESSEC’s own page before planning around a deadline, and compare every European MiM round on our interactive deadlines timeline (it tracks the Master in Management, not this programme).

Tuition, Scholarships & Funding

ESSEC publishes two cost tables for this programme, one per route, and both split by citizenship rather than by campus.¹ There is no separate Cergy or Singapore price: the rate you pay is decided by whether you hold EU citizenship, and the same table applies on either campus. Both tables are headed “Applicable for Intake 2026”.

Two years (M1 + M2) — the route you take if you hold a three-year bachelor’s or a Licence 3:

One year (M2 only) — the route you take if you hold a four-year bachelor’s or a master’s:

The line worth reading twice is the service fee: ESSEC states it is “payable in a single instalment and valid for the entire duration of the course,” so a two-year student pays it once while paying registration twice.¹ That is why the two-year total is not simply twice a yearly figure, and every one of the four totals above is ESSEC’s own and closes exactly on its own lines. Tuition and registration are both stated to be all taxes included.¹

A €5,000 deposit is payable within two weeks of admission and is deducted from tuition.¹ This profile sorts on the €47,830 two-year EU total, since that is the comparable all-in figure against other two-year programmes in the catalogue; a non-EU applicant should read €51,130.

ESSEC names three funding routes on the same page:¹

• The ESSEC Scholarship — €10,000, open to all international applicants and awarded on the overall quality of the file, including the management test score. There is no separate application: decisions are made during the admissions procedure and selected students are told when they are offered a place.
• The ESSEC Singapore Scholarship — up to 100% of tuition, but restricted to Singaporean citizens, and registration and service fees remain payable. It too is awarded at each admission session with no separate request.
• The CROUS scholarship route — a French state means-tested award. A holder “may be eligible for a full or partial exemption” from tuition, for the entire duration of studies for students entering in 2026/2027 and later, on the strength of a final award notification. Administrative enrolment fees and mandatory contributions still have to be paid in full.

All of the above was read from ESSEC’s own programme page on 9 September 2026.

Career Outcomes

ESSEC publishes no salary figure and no three-month employment rate for this programme, so this profile states neither. What its own Career Survey 2025 does report: 79% of graduates found their first job before graduating, 64% work outside their country of origin, and 68% hold a role with an international dimension.²

By sector, investment banking takes 37% of graduates, financial advisory and consulting 22%, private equity and venture capital 11%, brokerage and market finance 9%, and asset management and energy 7% each.² Geographically, 78% remain in Europe and 18% go to Asia. The roles ESSEC names span M&A analyst, sales structurer, trader, private equity and venture capital analyst, transaction services and valuation, risk manager, ECM/DCM analyst, asset manager, and project or structured finance analyst.²

Campus & Life

The French cohort studies at ESSEC’s Cergy campus, thirty-odd kilometres north-west of central Paris and the same campus as the Grande École MiM; the Singapore cohort studies at ESSEC Asia-Pacific. ESSEC runs four campuses in total — Paris-Cergy, Paris-La Défense, Singapore and Rabat — and holds the triple crown of AACSB, EQUIS and AMBA accreditations.² Applicants weighing this against the school’s flagship degree should read the ESSEC Master in Management profile beside it, since the two differ in structure, ranking table and entry test.