Atlanta · Founded 2016 · 501(c)(3)
They're using behavioral science against you. We create the research that fights back.
The Institute of FAME conducts and funds peer-reviewed research on financial decision-making in populations the financial-services industry rarely studies in depth — under-resourced consumers, small and mid-sized enterprises, and the citizens whose financial lives consumer-protection regulation is supposed to shape. The evidence is anchored in psychometric instruments the institute owns, and we turn it into two things: policy translation — briefs, op-eds, and regulatory comments that reach the regulators and advocates whose decisions move policy — and financial-education programs and tools that put the findings directly in people's hands.
Flagship instrument
MTI is the institute's flagship behavioral-measurement program — a six-archetype framework anchored in bond-instrument behavioral patterns, built to measure how individuals actually make everyday financial decisions. It is the rigorous, institutionally owned measurement the financial-education field has long needed and rarely had.
See the MTI program →The evidence base
FAME-funded studies on UK regulatory-sandbox effects (Journal of Risk and Financial Management, 2022) and FinTech adoption in manufacturing SMEs (Economies, 2023) have accumulated 75 peer-reviewed citations at Oxford, Imperial College London, King's College London, Sciences Po, KU Leuven, and other tier-1 European and U.S. institutions. The evidence anchors the institute's briefs, op-eds, and regulatory comments across the four issue areas.
Browse funded papers →Financial education
FAME's research is built to reach two audiences: the regulators and advocates who shape the rules, and the people the research is actually about. The institute translates its findings into financial-education programs and tools that bring what the evidence shows to the under-resourced consumers, educators, and community partners who need it most. Reaching people directly is half of why the institute exists.
Our approach →Issue areas
FAME concentrates its research and policy translation in four issue areas where the institute has demonstrated empirical standing.
Issue area · Financial Education Measurement
Personal-finance curricula reach 30 million U.S. K-12 students annually on largely-untested behavioral assumptions. What measurement-grade evidence shows which interventions actually predict adult financial outcomes?
Issue area · FinTech Regulation
Regulatory sandboxes have been adopted in more than fifty jurisdictions, but the empirical evidence on whether they accelerate productive entry — or just produce regulatory press releases — has lagged. What does the UK record actually show, and what should U.S. and other developed-economy regulators learn from it?
Issue area · FinTech Consumer Protection
Buy-now-pay-later, alternative credit data, and FinTech-driven small-business credit have produced uneven outcomes for under-resourced households and SMEs. Which products genuinely expand access — and which extract from the populations they serve?
Issue area · CBDC and Digital Money
134 jurisdictions are exploring central bank digital currencies, yet retail adoption in the early-launch markets has been thin. Under what behavioral conditions will citizens of developed-economy CBDC issuers actually migrate to the new instruments?
Why we can be trusted with your gift
The institute's founder and Chair, Dr. Patrick Bernard Washington, holds a Finance PhD from the University of Alabama (2016). He joined the Morehouse College faculty in 2012 and was promoted to Associate Professor of Finance in 2017; his courses regularly enrolled cross-registered students from Spelman College and Clark Atlanta University through the Atlanta University Center consortium. He has authored or co-authored 14 peer-reviewed publications that have accumulated 1,111 citations, with an h-index of 11 and an i10-index of 12. Earlier in his career he was an investment-banking analyst at Salomon Smith Barney (Citi) and a credit research analyst at Prudential Financial. The combined research, teaching-leadership, and Wall Street career produces the methodological credentials behind FAME's funding decisions — listed transparently on the Papers page and the Press page.
Citation metrics: Google Scholar, May 2026. OpenAlex confirms 817 citations / h-index 10 / i10-index 10 from the formal-database subset of indexed venues.
Year founded
2016
IRS classification
170(b)(1)(A)(vi)
Founder citations
1,111
FAME-funded studies
2