Our Research
Building Bridges Between Technology, Management and Society
FINATRAX conducts research on the application and the impact of decentralisation technology on organisations in the private or public sector. By doing so, it builds bridges between business research and information systems engineering.
Digital Transformation Needs Interdisciplinarity
Decentralisation technology is at the core of the group’s work on four focus technologies: Blockchain, Digital Identities, Artificial Intelligence, and Internet-of-Things. To gain insights about these technologies’ impact on organisations, the economy, and society, we analyse them from four angles: Finance, Management, Economics, and Governance.
Application areas are structured into four strategic research directions: FinTech, GovTech & RegTech, Energy Markets, and the Machine Economy.
Our Projects
FINATRAX emphasises diversity. Our research team consists of international researchers with backgrounds in management, technology, and other fields. They share a common interest in applying their knowledge to solve the big-think challenges of the future. The group fosters an interdisciplinary atmosphere in which researchers contribute to creating the link between technology, industry, and society. In fact, FINATRAX’s primary objective is to use the next generation of IT technologies to make a difference in the world.
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Duration:
2020 – 2025
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Funding source:
Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR), PayPal and the University of Luxembourg (P17/IS/13342933/PayPal-FNR/Chair in DFS/Gilbert Fridgen)
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Researchers:
Gilbert Fridgen
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Partners:
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Description:
With the PEARL programme, the FNR offers Luxembourg research institutions attractive funding to enable them to draw established and internationally recognised researchers from abroad to Luxembourg. Through the recruitment of outstanding scientists in strategically important areas, the FNR aims to accelerate the development and strengthening of Luxembourg’s national research priorities.
The PayPal-FNR PEARL Chair in Digital Financial Services supports the Luxembourg government’s goal of making the country a global leader in innovative financial services in the environment of the SnT. The FINATRAX Team and Professor Fridgen explore the future of those services in a data driven environment, considering a broad range of angles, from usability, onboarding and operational efficiency to regulatory supervision.
Areas of expertise include developing new opportunities for Blockchain/DLT, AI and IoT in the private and public sectors but also understanding financial implications, manage systemic risk and improve the efficiency. Another topic is the investigation of trusted autonomous payment methods. Further, the group is looking at how digital transformation in fintech and regulatory technology should look like to create generalizable principles that describe “what makes a good design.”
The special funding from PayPal and FNR has an initial duration of 5 years and is hosted at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust.
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Project details:
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Duration:
2022 – 2025
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Funding source:
Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR)
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Researchers:
Johannes Sedlmeir, Reilly Smethurst
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Partners:
Peter Y. Ryan (SnT)
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Description:
Art and collectibles markets tend to involve lower liquidity and higher fees than public equity markets. Distributed ledger technology can tokenize artworks and collectibles so that claims to these assets can be exchanged digitally without intermediaries. Tokenisation offers investors access to a global market plus a digitised paper trail, as well as new options for the fractional ownership of artworks, art-collateralised loans, and yield-bearing art assets. The main challenge for tokenisation researchers and platform developers is to simultaneously satisfy regulators’ demands for transparency and auditability as well as art investors’ demands for privacy. New technological solutions are needed, so that market participants can disclose the absolute minimum amount of information that is required by regulators. We explore new concepts from distributed ledger technology, cryptography, and digital identity management that can help address this challenge.
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Project details (PDF):
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Duration:
2021 – 2024
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Funding source:
Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR, C20/IS/14783405/FIReSpARX)
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Researchers:
Alexander Rieger, Eduard Hartwich, Renan Lima Baima
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Partners:
Miguel Angel Olivares-Mendez (SnT)
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Description:
In just a few years, space agencies and private companies will start to harvest resources in outer space. These harvesting missions may involve multiple robots owned by different agencies or companies operating in the same area. To improve efficiency, it will be reasonable for these robots to cooperate, for instance, by providing each other with data or by offering services, such as telecommunication to Earth. Yet in space, the unexpected can happen frequently, so planning cooperation between these robots in advance is not always possible. Instead, robots will need to make autonomous economic decisions, following the economic rationale of their owner company. For instance, robots will need to be able to establish the value of a certain service, bargain, and pay for it.
In the FiReSpARX project, we design market mechanisms, incentives, and governance frameworks for such economic interaction. Moreover, we implement and test a prototypical system in SnT’s LunaLab, which emulates the Moon’s surface.
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Project details (PDF):
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Duration:
2021 – 2023
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Funding source:
European Commission (INEA/CEF/ICT/A2020/2287601)
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Researchers:
Alexander Rieger, Egor Ermolaev
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Partners:
Luxembourg Ministry for Digitalisation
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Description:
The European Blockchain Service Infrastructure (EBSI) is a digital infrastructure for public services that is being jointly developed by the European Commission and the EU member states. EBSI is expected to bring significant benefits to EU citizens, enterprises and authorities by supporting cross-border (and local) applications. Digital Diplomas are one of the first applications supported by EBSI. The application is expected to give citizens more control of their educational credentials, reduce verification costs and improve trust in the diploma’s authenticity. From a technical perspective, this is possible by combining blockchain technology with an emerging digital identity standard named verifiable credentials. This standard enables privacy-oriented and machine-verifiable digitisation of any document or plastic card that is used for the purpose of identification, authorisation, authentication or attestation.
The objective of the EBSILUX Project is to make EBSI and its Digital Diplomas available in Luxembourg. In particular, we work together with Luxembourg’s Ministry for Digitalisation, Infrachain, LIST, and the University of Luxembourg to implement and trial EBSI’s Digital Diplomas. The implementation is considered to be an essential building block for many future EBSI use cases in the public and private sector.
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Project details (PDF):
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Duration:
2019 – 2023
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Funding source:
EU Horizon 2020 (814654)
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Researchers:
Alexander Rieger, Joaquin Delgado Fernandez
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Partners:
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Description:
MDOT is a cross-organisational workflow digitalisation project regarding the European medical device conformity process. This is the process that new medical devices must go through to prove compliance to regulation and market standards with the purpose to ensure quality and safety of medical devices circulated on the market.
The legal regulations on which the project is based on is a new regulatory framework for medical devices, Medical Device Regulation/MDR (EU 2017/745) and was first published in 2017 to replace EU regulation on medical devices/MDD (Council Directive 93/42/EEC) and active implantable medical devices/AIMD (Council Directive 90/385/EEC). Not only does MDR replace MDD and AIMD but is an upgrade to be more inclusive and stricter on the regulation of medical devices.
The primary objective of the MDOT consortium is to prevent regulatory pressure from hampering innovation and competitiveness of Europe’s MedTech SMEs. From leveraging the use of digital technologies, we hope to lubricate the release of innovative medical devices on the market by allowing MedTech SMEs to effectively prove clinical equivalence of comparative products. The consortium’s proposal is to create a digital platform in which various participants to the medical device conformity process can coordinate workflows and securely share information.
We as the FINATRAX team will collect use cases and create the high-level design. We will then go on to implement the technical solution and document the testing of it.
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Project details (PDF):
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Duration:
2021-2022
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Funding source:
Fondation de Luxembourg / Fondation Enovos
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Researchers:
Michael Schöpf, Raviteja Chemudupaty, Hanna Marxen
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Partners:
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Description:
The increase of Electrical Vehicles (EVs) poses a challenge for the electricity system, as it may cause high load peaks in certain hours and may thus increase the energy invoice of EV owners.
The project INDUCTIVE (Incentivised charging scheduling for electric vehicles) tackles this challenge and aims to develop the means for electricity suppliers to gain control over power consumption patterns of EV charging. By exploiting the flexibility in each EV charging timespan, the overall load on the electricity system can be balanced and electricity will be procured at lower prices. This strategy would not only reduce the suppliers’ procurement costs and the invoices of their customers, but it would also improve their competitiveness to private-owned energy generation and storage technologies.
To achieve this objective, INDUCTIVE will investigate the feasibility of developing three necessary enablers: (1) an estimation of the potential earnings of energy suppliers exploiting the flexibility of coordinated EV charging; (2) an incentive scheme determining proper incentives that suppliers can offer to customers in exchange of their flexibility; (3) a decision-making system that can schedule the charging timespan of the EV fleet to optimize the economic benefits while satisfying the customers’ charging requirements.
INDUCTIVE will result in a proof of concept integrating the above three enablers together with a prototype of a mobile app interfacing EV owners with the system. For this purpose, FINATRAX will the preferences of the different stakeholders and contribute to transform these preferences into a decision-making system.
Overall, the project will lead to an innovation of the energy retail market by automatically deciding when and how fast to charge the car based on preset preferences and with the objective to minimise the customers’ charging and the suppliers’ procurement cost.
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Project details (PDF):
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Duration:
2016-2022
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Funding source:
German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, 03SFK3A3-2)
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Researchers:
Michael Schöpf, Ramin Bahmani, Rajon Bhuiyan, Sergio Potenciano Menci, Christine van Stiphoudt
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Partners:
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Description:
By 2050, all electricity in Germany should come from renewable sources. The problem is that wind and solar power do not provide a regular electricity supply, but rather fluctuate. Sometimes more electricity is available than is actually needed, sometimes less.
Production processes in the industry have a high potential of shifting their energy consumption to the needs of the future electricity system (demand side flexibility).
Therefore, the German Kopernikus project SynErgie aims at creating all technical and market conditions in accordance with legal and social aspects within the next ten years, in order to effectively synchronize the energy demand of German industry with the volatile energy supply.
All major energy-intensive industry branches of Germany (aluminum, automotive, cement, chemistry, food, glass, plastics, machinery and equipment) are represented as well as electricity market participants and grid operators. The consortium is led by a board of researchers from various disciplines and advised by industry representatives. These work together with all the partners from industry, NGOs and scientists, e.g., from the fields of energy economics, operations research, computer science, law, and sociology. The project consists of six sub-projects to cover this topic from all different perspectives (see illustration). Within this range, the FINATRAX chair positions its research especially on the interconnection of flexible industry processes to the electricity markets and optimizing the economic prospects of flexibility.
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Project details (PDF):