FinTech Center
Finance reimagined: mobile, automated, intelligent
Whether you’re making a quick payment, balancing accounts using API connectivity, or growing your portfolio with a robo-advisor — the FinTech industry ensures the future of money is here.
With significant FinTech growth observed in our home state, the University of Florida Warrington College of Business’ FinTech Research Center is perfectly positioned to drive an industry built on disruption.
Today, roughly half of all people use at least one fintech product — and investors realize this. Companies in this sector have surged from just under 6,000 in 2018 to about 14,000 in 2024, and roughly 20% of all venture capital investments by dollar go to a fintech startup of some kind.
The FinTech Research Center strives to study and spur these developments, create new best practices, and train UF students and working professionals for these highly impactful roles.
Join us and see and how you can unleash a new era of innovation.
About the FinTech Center
In the 2010s, fintech hubs sprang up all over the globe, including in Miami and Tampa. What they’ve launched makes all aspects of money management more convenient — but they also carry concerns ranging from accuracy to cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Here’s where we step in.
Our purpose
The University of Florida Warrington College of Business FinTech Research Center advances financial innovation by uniting faculty, industry practitioners and students to deliver applied research, pilot emerging technologies and accelerate workforce development.
Interdisciplinary collaboration
There’s always a new technology to implement, a new vulnerability to patch or a new solution to remedy a customer concern. The FinTech Research Center serves partners across the full spectrum of financial services, including banking, asset and wealth management, payments, insurance, and market infrastructure, with a consistent focus on reproducibility, governance, and talent cultivation.
Four core pillars
The FinTech Research Center’s work is grounded in four core pillars:
- Fuel innovation: Transform complex questions into tested, production-minded solutions.
- Develop talent: Build a pipeline of students and alumni skilled in finance, analytics, and state of the art technology.
- Inform policy: Deliver evidence-based insights on topics such as AI risk, market integrity, and financial access.
- Create economic impact: Drive measurable improvements in performance, cost, and risk.
FinTech research
Research priorities are shaped by industry collaboration and designed to deliver scalable, actionable insights that drive progress across the financial services landscape. The depth of FinTech goes far beyond coding.
Faculty deliver comprehensive expertise, connecting the theoretical and practical sides of blockchain, DeFi, and cryptocurrencies with crucial fields like advanced modeling, natural language processing, and consumer behavior analytics.
Artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing
The technology driving tomorrow’s finance involves artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing. We research advanced applications including market forecasting, real-time anomaly detection, document intelligence and the integration of large language model-powered workflows for process automation.
Digital assets and blockchain
Building the infrastructure for decentralized finance requires master of digital assets and blockchain. Our focus areas include risk mapping for digital assets, smart contract analysis and the study of DeFi infrastructure to ensure security and scalability.
Risk, RegTech and cybersecurity
Ensuring compliance and resilience in a digital landscape is dependent upon strong risk, RegTech and cybersecurity protocols. We specialize in model governance, digital surveillance and monitoring systems and regulatory automation (RegTech) to manage risk effectively.
Payments and open finance
Payments and open finance drive real-time financial connectivity. Key research includes real-time payment systems, developing secure API ecosystems and cutting-edge fraud analytics to maintain trust and security.
Financial access and resilience
Fostering a sustainable and equitable financial future isn’t possible without access and resilience. We address social impact areas such as fair-access credit, green finance and sustainable investing and advanced climate-risk modeling for institutional resilience.
Cross-cutting accelerators
Accelerators establish the best practices for technological execution. We develop foundational elements that accelerate innovation across all sectors, including reproducibility standards, MLOps strategies for deployment and robust governance frameworks.
Explore opportunities
Whether you are a prospective student, corporate partner or an alumnus, there are multiple ways to engage with the FinTech Center and its growing network.
How can we partner?
Stay connected to the FinTech Research Center to learn about our research, initiatives and partnerships.
Engagement models
We offer structured paths for exploratory work, targeted problem-solving, and long-horizon R&D. These include capstones and internships, member-driven projects of 12-16 weeks aimed at a lightweight prototype or study, and sponsored research with deeper collaborations with faculty labs to advance novel methods or build robust tooling for scale.
Study the future of FinTech
Study financial theories alongside AI, data and blockchain applications through a program that introduces concepts with real-world projects and case studies.
Why partner with UF for FinTech?
The FinTech Research Center’s ability to deliver industry leading results is powered by the unparalleled resources and academic depth of the University of Florida.
AI leadership
Built on more than 100 AI-focused faculty and HiPerGator, one of the most powerful academic supercomputers in the United States, UF’s capabilities enable large-scale analytics, model stress testing and simulation.
Cross-disciplinary talent
The Warrington College of Business boast a talent pool of more than 8,000 students across 35 academic programs and are supported by nationally recognized faculty.
Florida momentum
As Florida continues to grow into a major financial-services hub, UF provides a neutral, thought leading and innovation-focused platform to engage with this expanding ecosystem.
Enterprise-ready engagement
Projects and center engagement are scoped with
Membership tiers
FinTech Center membership aligns the depth of engagement with the scope of benefits. Full and associate members receive non-exclusive, royalty-free access to center-funded results, per university policy.
| Tier | Annual investment | Benefits snapshot |
|---|---|---|
| Full partner | $50,000 | Priority scoping, full IP access, concierge recruiting |
| Associate | $25,000 | Standard access to results and recruiting, event visibility |
| Affiliate | In-kind | Limited access via data/tools/expertise contributions; upgrade path available |
FinTech news
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Stay connected to the FinTech Center
Share your contact information so we can share our research advances and information about the partnerships that are reshaping the future of FinTech.
Collaborate with us
We inhabit a field with tremendous, always-accelerating potential. As you stake your organization’s future, partner with Warrington to fuel internal innovation, collaboratively problem-solve and tap into a steady stream of talent.
David A. Mascio, Ph.D.
Executive director
Andy Naranjo, Ph.D.
Chair, Eugene F. Brigham Department of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate
LaKendra Cook
Program Director, M.S. in Finance & Technology program