The Finance Sector is the biggest source of GDP for Luxembourg. In terms of value creation and international competitiveness, there are important and largely untapped areas where financial innovation will help consolidate and grow the industry in the country, while also helping to transform the corresponding segment of ICT Finance Sector providers. To this day, the industry has demonstrated that purely technological discoveries have not been enough to transform its services, reduce continuously rising costs or avoid the collapses experienced in the cyclical crises of the industry. Opportunities from digitisation still remain mostly untapped.
FINANCE INNOVATION TECHNOLOGY AND SYSTEMS CENTRE
The measure of success for FITS will be its impact and its ability to bridge a gap between research and industry players. Its working approach is based on two critical business principles:
- Systemic interdisciplinarity: financial innovation challenges cannot be based on Fintech aspects alone but need to be addressed in an integrated and holistic manner as a combination of people, practices and processes.
- Industry segment focus: Instead of targeting financial services as a whole, FITS will focus its applied research solely on subjects that generate tangible economic value for the local finance industry.
Consequently, the new centre has identified four select and interrelated domains as its main focus areas. In all of these, there is a significant opportunity for Luxembourg to grow a prominent role for the rest of Europe by the proper design and widely accessible distribution of new systems and services. Those fields are:
- Investment Management and Funds
- Private Banking and Wealth Management
- Risk and Finance & Accounting Competences
- Regulatory Compliance and Legal Technologies.
UNIQUE APPROACH IN LUXEMBOURG
FITS will focus on digital technologies as an accelerator in the deep interplay between people, practices and processes. The research challenges will be approached with world-class expertise in Business Analytics, made possible thanks to recent recruitments at LIST. FITS will not work on “generic technology” topics such as blockchain and other security, software engineering or reliability issues. It will focus only on practical and value-driven solutions with all financial industry parties and the related ICT companies. FITS proposes to work in close collaboration with all the instrumental government actors including the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, the National Research Fund, the Ministry of the Economy and the Ministry of Finance.