What is FIRSA?
FIRSA studies the development of FinTech regulation in Europe, particularly regulatory sandboxes and innovation facilitators, as well as the political economy of digital finance. The project examines why European countries adopt different institutional responses to financial innovation, how these responses vary in practice, and what kinds of evidence are needed to compare them across countries.
FinTech regulation is often discussed through formal legal categories, however, much of its practical significance depends on implementation, administrative capacity and the way regulators understand innovation and risk. FIRSA therefore combines comparative political economy, regulatory analysis, quantitative indicators, computational text methods, interviews, and public-facing data tools.
The main research agenda focuses on three related questions. First, why do some European countries adopt regulatory sandboxes or similar innovation facilities earlier than others. Second, how do central banks, supervisors, and public authorities describe FinTech disruption and the role of regulation. Third, how do citizens interact with digital finance, including crypto-asset ownership, financial literacy, digital confidence, and trust in financial advice.
A central output of the project is the FIRSA Dashboard, which provides interactive tools for exploring digital finance and FinTech indicators in Europe. These tools are intended to make the evidence collected throughout the project easier to inspect, compare, and disseminate.
The website also hosts methods materials produced as part of the project’s training and dissemination activities. These include tutorials on web scraping, named entity recognition, zero-shot text classification, research dashboards, and cloud deployment for Shiny applications. These resources support the broader aim of making computational research workflows more transparent and easier to adapt for policy and academic audiences.
| Output | Focus | Link |
|---|---|---|
| FIRSA Dashboard | Interactive indicators and models on digital finance in Europe | Open dashboard |
| Crypto ownership working paper | Financial literacy, overconfidence, and crypto-asset ownership in Europe | Read paper |
| FinTech narratives working paper | Central bank discourse and the political economy of disruptive finance | Read paper |
| Methods resources | Tutorials and workshops on Shiny, Cloud Run, web scraping, and text analysis | View posts |
Funding
This project has received funding from the European Union Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships / ERA Fellowships action under grant agreement No. 101180601 under the title: Understanding FinTech Regulatory Sandbox Development in Europe (FIRSA).