Professor Antonio Gargano, who’s spent over a decade navigating both worlds, opened his keynote at Future Finance Fest with a truth bomb: “Successful collaborations between academia and fintech are possible, but only when both sides stop pretending they speak the same language.”
He wasn’t exaggerating.
From his research on behavioral finance, household savings, green fintech, and even real estate auctions, Gargano has seen both the promise and the pitfalls. One project with a real estate platform helped create a predictive index of buyer demand. Another, with a green neobank, used emissions tracking to nudge users toward more sustainable choices.
But none of that came easy.
“Fintech data doesn’t come with a manual,” Gargano noted. “It’s messy, it’s undocumented, and access is wrapped in legal knots. And yet, it’s exactly what we need if we want to do research that actually affects people’s lives.”
For fintechs, the benefits are clear. Academic rigor can validate product claims, improve user outcomes, and even unlock new revenue streams. One firm Gargano worked with used his paper to boost its data pricing tenfold. Another landed press coverage across Europe by showing that goal-setting features actually helped users save more.
“The magic happens,” he said, “when there’s mutual benefit. And mutual respect.”
The Real Value of “Outside” Thinking
One of Gargano’s biggest points was that academics bring something most fintech teams, or even consultants can’t.
“We don’t chase correlations,” he said. “We chase causality.”
That matters. Because in a world where data is easy to collect but hard to interpret, understanding why something works is more valuable than just knowing that it does. And because academics don’t have a commercial stake in the outcome, their insights often carry more credibility.
Still, it’s not all upside. Academic timelines can stretch for years. Industry needs answers in weeks. One panelist put it plainly: “Academics want to be 100% sure. Fintechs move at 80% confidence and launch.”
The gap is real. But it’s bridgeable if both sides understand the trade-offs.
It’s a Two-Way Street
Professor David Stolin, co-organizer of the event, sees enormous potential in these unlikely partnerships. “It’s not about academics bringing theory to the ‘real world.’ It’s about creating feedback loops. Fintechs test ideas at scale. Academics help explain what works and why. It’s a two-way street, and both sides can move faster by working together.”
That was the vibe on the ground in Vilnius. Conversations were candid, sometimes even brutally honest and unfiltered, but always rooted in possibility.
There were debates about data ownership. Confessions about failed collaborations. But there were also clear pathways forward: midsize fintechs with agile data teams. Clear alignment on research objectives. A shared contact who keeps momentum alive. And, crucially, human relationships that can’t be replaced by AI.
“Honestly,” Gargano joked, “outside conferences like this, your best shot at a collaboration is meeting someone at the beach whose brother works at a fintech.”
Beyond the Dataset
One of the more surprising themes to emerge was this: not every collaboration needs to start with proprietary fintech data.
A group in Berlin is using survey-based data to measure financial health, and inviting banks, regulators, and fintechs to explore it together. The idea? Data doesn’t need to be secret to be useful. And collaboration doesn’t always mean handing over your raw logs.
This broadening of the conversation, from data access to co-designing questions, might be what finally makes academic-fintech partnerships scale.
Because the opportunity is bigger than product validation or paper citations. It’s about building smarter systems, systems that learn not just from customers, but from each other.
Don’t Let This Be a One-Off
There’s a lot of talk about bridging the gap between academia and industry. But it rarely goes beyond talk.
What made Future Finance Fest different is that people showed up, ready to listen, challenge, and rethink the rules. And while the differences in pace, in priorities, in process were clear, so was the alignment: both sides want to make finance more intelligent, more ethical, and more effective.
That won’t happen if everyone stays in their lane.
As Professor Gargano put it: “Academics and fintechs evolve in different environments, but when they understand each other, they build better things. Period.”
Academics Are from Mars, Fintechs Are from Venus - Nordic Fintech Magazine
