Financial Innovation

The financial industry sees major changes based on at least two major developments: FinTech and Big Data.

Digitisation has led to an unprecedented collection of data, commonly labelled Big Data. The technological innovations in financial services are forcing commercial banks and other financial intermediaries to adapt.

The Department of Finance works together with the University of Luxembourg’s Department of Law for an interdisciplinary approach to the topic of FinTech. The Department of Law’s FinTech and Digitalisation group focuses on legal and regulatory issues. while the The Department of Finance discusses FinTech from a finance perspective.

Our research has a clear interdisciplinary nature by sharing ingredients from Finance, Information Technology, Management, and Law.

Business and data analytics, combined with behavioural decision-making analysis can help fund and wealth managers assess investors’ preferences, and enhance the alignment of investment advices. The University of Luxembourg’s expertise in IT security makes a strong collaboration with researchers from the Luxembourg Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) most natural.

Since new technological developments always come together with an adaption of regulations, cooperation with the Law department will be crucial. Our research focuses on fintech applications such as blockchain, robo-advisory, crypto-currencies, and mass access investment platforms, which have the potential to revolutionise the finance industry.

Research taking big data into account follow naturally in finance. Finance has always been a very data intensive field and thus expertise in how to handle and analyse data is wide spread within the finance profession. The research topics which now become relevant is now:

1. how the dual increase of computing power as well as amounts of data leads to new research methods;
2. how the increased availability of data impacts the functioning and efficiency of financial markets and the financial industry.

The methods we use for our research programmes can be separated along the dimensions of empirical analysis and theoretical research. We follow both dimensions, but empirical research is clearly increasing in importance. This is due to improved data availability and computing power, but also to the important focus of the digitisation strategy of the University.