Across Disciplines: Christian Fisch and Julia Sinnig on collaborative research

How can law, finance, and entrepreneurship work together to address the fast-moving challenges of FinTech?

To explore this question, we spoke to two researchers at the core of FutureFinTech’s interdisciplinary mission: Christian Fisch, an expert in innovation and entrepreneurship, and Julia Sinnig, a legal scholar specialising in regulation.

Together, they reflect on six key questions that reveal both the complexity and the potential of cross-disciplinary research in the FinTech space.

1. What does interdisciplinarity mean to you?

Your backgrounds are quite different. Christian, you focus on finance and entrepreneurship, while Julia, your expertise is in law and regulation. What motivated you to collaborate across disciplines? How would you each define interdisciplinarity in your work?

Christian Fisch: The complexity of research projects is high. This involves researchers from different disciplines a critical requirement, as most projects need various skillsets and areas of expertise. This is even more critical if we talk about new technologies (like AI) and their applications, which typically span different fields. Moreover, entrepreneurship is interdisciplinary by nature, often requiring deep technical expertise along with business expertise. To me, the key characteristics of interdisciplinarity is leveraging complementary competencies, whether it is in research or practice (e.g., when creating a venture).

Julia Sinnig: Impactful research in today’s interconnected, dynamic world cannot be anything else but interdisciplinary. If we limit our research to our specific disciplinary field, we will never fully understand the complexity of the real world, and produce output that remains limited in its practical application. Especially in FinTech, regulating means understanding the real world, and this requires us lawyers to leave the purely legal domain and tip our toes into other disciplines to fully understand what we try to regulate.

Finally, interdisciplinarity in my work means to understand the underlying technologies, business structures, financial markets etc. that we (try to) regulate with various legal acts, and to make use of these insights when implementing and enforcing the law.  

What we learned ? Interdisciplinarity isn’t a buzzword, it’s the foundation of meaningful, future-ready research.

2. What are the biggest challenges of combining finance, entrepreneurship, and law?

Each field has its own approach, from legal frameworks and case law to market dynamics and financial models. What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve encountered when integrating insights from both finance and law? How do you navigate them?

Christian Fisch: One challenge is that researchers are often trained in very different ways, which leads to different “ways of talking”, different methodological approaches, and different approaches to solving problems. While finding consensus may be challenging, these differences in training can lead to out-of-the box solutions that are difficult to see and realize when only working within a discipline.

Julia Sinnig: Different methodologies are the biggest obstacle in interdisciplinary work. For example, in economics and finance, models are based on assumptions. Assumptions are a concept that is not existent in law. For lawyers, assumptions often look overly exclusionary, whereas they are essential to perform proper financial or economic modelling. This is indeed difficult to translate into legal language.

Did you know?
FutureFinTech’s working paper series is open access, helping bridge academia and industry while showcasing collaborative research from the University of Luxembourg.

3. Is regulation a barrier or a catalyst for FinTech innovation?

Some see regulation as essential for stability and trust, while others argue it stifles innovation. From your perspective, how does regulation shape FinTech’s future? How can interdisciplinary research help strike the right balance?

Christian Fisch: In most cases, there is some form of inverse u-shaped relationship between regulation and innovation. No regulation leads to uncertainty, a lack of norms, and adverse behaviour, which can discourage innovation. Conversely, too much regulation hinders the pursuit of innovative strategies.

Julia Sinnig: Striking the right balance between regulation and non-regulation (and therefore openness to innovation) is probably one of the really difficult tasks when regulating FinTech. The objective should be to create secure, reliable frameworks that allow for innovation which contributes to rather than damages financial markets. Leaving the “right” amount of “freedom” to market actors, however, is a value judgment that you can only pronounce with certainty from hindsight. We see this happening a lot in the crypto sphere which has been long unregulated, with all the detrimental effects that you can observe (fraud, theft, etc.).

Takeaway: Effective regulation can be an enabler, not a hindrance, when it’s built on an understanding of both innovation and risk.

4. How do you make your research accessible to different audiences?

Legal scholars and FinTech researchers often speak different languages—one focused on policy, the other on markets and innovation. How do you ensure your work remains relevant and accessible to both communities?

Christian Fisch: One thing that all researchers have in common is that they like to publish their research. The outlets can vary, but the ultimate goal of producing some research that is made accessible to the public is typically shared. This is why we set up the FutureFinTech working paper series, which allows us to distribute early-stage research in a unified way via SSRN.

Julia Sinnig: I join Christian in his statement. Our FutureFinTech working paper series will be a first step towards true interdisciplinary publications, with open access to our written works to all those interested. This also requires us to find common language in our papers. I think research projects like FutureFinTech  are pioneering in bringing interdisciplinary research forward, and I am curious to see how our initiatives will be perceived 50 years from now – maybe, by then, there is nothing else BUT interdisciplinary research!

5. What’s next for interdisciplinary FinTech research?

As technology continues to disrupt financial services, what are the most pressing research questions at the intersection of law, entrepreneurship, and finance? Where do you see interdisciplinary collaboration making the biggest impact in the coming years?

Christian Fisch: I think we will see a lot of experimentation with new technologies, especially those based on AI. This will increase the need for technical expertise, regulation on technologies, and for identifying real world applications based on this technology. I am sure that other technologies will follow, so that there is plenty of exciting opportunities on the horizon.

Julia Sinnig: I agree that AI and AI-based automation will play a big role in the years to come. Beyond that, we will see movement in the field of crypto and tokenisation. Tokenisation has a huge potential, also with a view to facilitating legal transactions.

Outlook: FutureFinTech researchers are keeping an eye on tomorrow – from AI to tokenisation, while shaping the regulatory and entrepreneurial frameworks they’ll require.

6. If you could give one piece of advice to researchers looking to collaborate across disciplines, what would it be?

Christian Fisch: Establish a common language to ensure understanding across disciplines.

Julia Sinnig: Start communicating with each other, continue communicating with each other and never stop communicating with each other. Visit conferences of other disciplines, read papers of other disciplines, question your own thinking based on what you learned from other disciplines.

FutureFinTech exists to break barriers between disciplines, by design, not by accident. As researchers like Christian Fisch and Julia Sinnig demonstrate, combining law, finance, and entrepreneurship isn’t easy. But it’s essential. The future of financial innovation depends on it.

About FutureFinTech

FutureFinTech, founded by researchers from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) and the Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance (FDEF) at the University of Luxembourg, takes a holistic approach to fintech innovation. By combining technical expertise with financial knowledge and regulatory understanding, FutureFinTech develops practical solutions that address real-world needs in our rapidly evolving financial landscape.

FutureFinTech is supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund and the Ministry of Finance.