Where we stand

The institute's positions on specific policy questions.

Each position is drawn directly from FAME-funded research findings, with peer-review evidence as the primary backing. The institute is conservative where the evidence is conservative; we do not take institutional positions beyond what funded research can support. Positions are reviewed annually and revised as the evidence base accumulates.

Issue area

FinTech Regulatory Frameworks

Issue area detail →

Question

Should the United States adopt a federal regulatory sandbox modeled on the UK Financial Conduct Authority's program?

FAME's position

The UK Financial Conduct Authority sandbox — the world's first and most-studied — is associated in the empirical record with a statistically significant decline in digital-bank performance across every standard metric (net interest margin, ROA, ROE, yield on earning assets), robust to controls; the mechanism appears to be increased compliance and operational costs from bespoke supervisory arrangements, not the lighter-touch regulation sandboxes are typically marketed on. The harm is concentrated in larger, more mature, and state-owned institutions — the firms whose advocacy most often drives sandbox adoption — while only the youngest, smallest firms show positive coefficients. The institute therefore does not support general-purpose federal sandbox programs marketed as innovation accelerators. It supports, at most, narrowly scoped programs limited to genuinely novel business models facing real regulatory ambiguity (not established models seeking lighter ongoing supervision), with mandatory publication of structured post-program performance data so the U.S. record is evaluable. On one published study of 24 UK firms, the institute's position is that more evidence should precede, not follow, federal adoption.

Evidence base

— Washington, Rehman & Lee (2022), Nexus between Regulatory Sandbox and Performance of Digital Banks, JRFM (DOI 10.3390/jrfm15120610) — UK FCA panel of 24 digital banks (2016–2021) showing a statistically significant negative association between sandbox participation and all four performance metrics (NIM, ROA, ROE, YEA), with lag effects stronger than contemporaneous and harm concentrated in larger, more mature, and state-owned firms.
— Forthcoming: U.S.-state sandbox programs replication study (Year 2)

Adopted 2026-05-08

Issue area

FinTech Consumer Protection

Issue area detail →

Question

What policy interventions productively expand FinTech adoption in small and mid-sized manufacturing enterprises?

FAME's position

FinTech adoption in manufacturing SMEs is shaped substantially by firm-level factors (institutional readiness, prior digital-financial-service engagement, bank-relationship structure) that are responsive to targeted policy intervention. Generic FinTech-promotion programs without firm-level support produce uneven adoption that excludes precisely the sub-categories of SMEs (smaller firms, less-well-banked sectors, female-founded SMEs) whose access expansion would deliver the strongest financial-inclusion gains. The institute supports targeted SME-credit and FinTech-adoption programs that incorporate firm-level capability-building, distinguished from broad-stroke FinTech-promotion frameworks.

Evidence base

— Rehman et al. (2023), FinTech Adoption in SMEs and Bank Credit Supplies, Economies (DOI 10.3390/economies11080213) — firm-level adoption-determinants framework on manufacturing SMEs.

Adopted 2026-05-08

Issue area

Digital Monetary Instrument Adoption

Issue area detail →

Question

How should the European Central Bank — and the U.S. Federal Reserve and Bank of England in their respective deliberations — communicate about retail CBDC adoption?

FAME's position

On evidence from the institute's CBDC pre-adoption research, institutional-legitimacy framing alone is unlikely to convert citizen awareness of CBDCs into adoption-relevant interest, and may actually suppress migration intent among citizens satisfied with current institutional arrangements (the legitimacy paradox). Effective digital-euro and analogous retail-CBDC communication architectures require stage-specific framing: institutional-credibility messaging is appropriate for the awareness stage, but separate messaging — emphasizing what the new instrument provides that current systems do not — is required to convert awareness into interest. The institute supports communication-architecture research and pilot evaluation that distinguishes these stages explicitly.

Evidence base

— Washington (lead), forthcoming, Is CBDC Adoption Staged? (under review at Technological Forecasting and Social Change) — staged-adoption framework on Eurobarometer 509 data with the legitimacy-paradox finding documented across multilevel-logistic, Bayesian, and Random Forest analyses.

Adopted 2026-05-08

What the institute does not take positions on

FAME's positions are bounded by the institute's research base and policy agenda. The institute does not take institutional positions on:

Cryptocurrency speculation, ICOs, NFT markets, or DeFi protocol-level policy. Not aligned with FAME's behavioral-decision-making and consumer-financial-protection focus.
Macroeconomic policy (monetary, fiscal, trade) outside the specific intersection of monetary-instrument adoption that the digital-monetary-instrument issue area covers.
ESG investing positions outside their direct connection to under-resourced-consumer financial decision-making.
Insurance, actuarial, real-estate, or housing-finance research. Adjacent topics where FAME has no evidence base.

On questions outside the institute's research base, FAME either declines to take a position, refers to peer institutions with stronger standing in the area, or considers whether a Board-approved expansion of the policy agenda is warranted.