Fintechs and academics of the world, unite: How collaborating with a fintech scholar can turbocharge your startup

Building a fintech is hard – you need all the help you can get. And yet an enormous untapped resource is, literally, just sitting there.

Academic researchers.

Every university and business school has them. They are just sitting there and working on, well, academic research.

They are my tribe, and I love them. They went into academia out of a passion for making sense of the world and sharing their knowledge and discoveries. They’ve spent years, and often decades, on acquiring and perfecting the formidable analytical tools needed to be on the cutting edge of their field. Discovering something we didn’t know before is what gets their juices flowing. Publishing it in a leading academic journal and getting the article cited by their peers is their validation. And if the research makes real-world impact, that’s their nirvana.

As a fintech, you have a simple way to tap into this supply of world-class brainpower: just talk to them.

A researcher is always on the lookout for cool things to study. Fintech-curious academics – including many of those whose job title, like mine, reads “professor of finance” – are potentially open to spending hundreds of hours working, quite possibly for free, on a topic of vital importance to your fintech, provided they think it is likely to lead to a high-quality academic article. If that’s not a win-win, I don’t know what is.

But what can you offer them to grab their interest?

Much, actually. It may simply be flagging a specific “pain point” that the academic literature hasn’t spotted yet. It might be collaborating on a controlled experiment (“A/B testing” to you) in order to establish causal relationships rather than mere correlations. It might be providing unique data (suitably anonymized and subject to an NDA) to be analyzed. And once the collaboration gets under way, you may well be stunned at the magnitude of benefits to your fintech.

But don’t take my word for it. I have asked leading researchers at some of the world’s most reputed business schools to share their thoughts on how academics can benefit fintechs. Here are their answers.

Ilya Strebulaev, The David S. Lobel Professor of Private Equity at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Director of the Venture Capital Initiative and author of the best seller The Venture Mindset:

• Academics – finance and economics professors specifically – can help designing efficient / optimal mechanisms. For example, for fintechs in B2C space offering packages to retail customers.

• Academics can help utilizing data fintechs assemble and thus making fintechs themselves more known / reputable.

• Academics can help identify market needs based on what research and trends show or suggest ways to introduce another product or business line.

Gary Dushnitsky, Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School, and director of ‘Fintech Forward: Strategies for Incumbents and Startups’ course:

• Today we celebrate the value of embracing diverse perspectives. Along these lines, I found academic-practitioner conversation to be effective to both parties as it offers a fresh perspective. Specifically…

• An academic perspective can help with ‘pattern recognition’ and ‘seeing the forest for the trees’ – identifying common success drivers across different geographies or settings.

• Relatedly, there is a level of methodological rigor and capability that can enhance solution development through cutting-edge research and/or data analysis.

Dion Bongaerts, Professor of Financial Technology and Data Analytics at Rotterdam School of Management and Academic Director Fintech at the Erasmus Center for Data Analytics:

• From my role as an academic advisor to a start-up as well as a coach for the students in my FinTech Course that I run as an incubator, I see that a high-level overview is often missing and the entrepreneurs tend to focus too much on details. We as academics are well-trained in that.

• I notice that I can often summarize a business pitch in two or three sentences that better reflect the project and value added than what the entrepreneurs come up with. I also notice that the choices many FinTech entrepreneurs make for their technologies are often not optimal given the problem they are faced with. About half the blockchain/token projects I get to see can at least in part be more efficiently implemented on a centralized infrastructure. A lot of projects would benefit more from a dashboard than AI/ML usage, etc.

• What it typically comes down to is for a business to recognize the frictions they are alleviating. That is, start from a frictionless world, see how frictions reduce value, and then see to which extent they can resolve these frictions. This immediately gives a good estimate of the value that is unlocked.

Lauren Cohen, L.E. Simmons Chaired Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and creator of the HarvardX Fintech course:

• The most compelling reason that fintechs and aspiring fintechs should keep one ear squarely pointed at academia is the white space nature of the opportunity they have in front of them.

• If you were starting a new hospital today that aimed to deliver care exactly like every other hospital, you simply need to look at what other hospitals are doing, and essentially follow their model – which by construction must comply with the latest laws, patient guidelines, practice of care, etc. That is traditional banking. However, fintechs have the precise opportunity to come in and disrupt and upend traditional finance, creating completely new products, services, and ways of doing business. To this end, to the extent you wanted to create an entirely new system, it makes complete sense that the place you would want to look is first principles. You would start at the very beginning of what a financial system should be doing and could be doing, and build from that point to create entirely new solutions.

• This is exactly where academia, and academics, provide the gold standard of knowledge. And this is the precise reason that even very experienced financial executives and regulators come back to my course to learn from that first principles approach.

But, I hear you say, show me concrete cases where academic research in finance actually led to the creation of successful businesses. Well, I was asked to write an article, not a book (but if you do want a book, the classic “Capital Ideas” is a great start). The multi-trillion-dollar index fund industry, for one, grew directly out of academic research. Or take Cornell University finance professor Roni Michaeli’s work on the performance of stock market analysts. They were the inspiration for the analyst ranking platform created by the fintech TipRanks – which Prof. Michaeli joined as an advisor and investor. TipRanks later enhanced their offering by drawing on insights from a study co-authored by Prof. Cohen (yes, the same one who just pitched his fintech course to you) examining which corporate insider stock transactions are particularly profitable. “Keeping one ear squarely pointed at academia” has paid off for TipRanks: a few months ago, a 40% stake in it was sold for $80 million.

So how do you unearth these academics who are open to discussing with fintechs? Fortunately, we are doing it for you. Future Finance Fest, to be held in Vilnius, Lithuania on 25-27 August is optimized for conversations and collaborations between fintechs and academics. Visit www.fufifest.org – and see you in Vilnius!

David Stolin is a professor of finance at TBS Business School in Toulouse, France and co-founder of Ed.movie, Inc. His academic research has been published in such leading outlets as Journal of Finance and Management Science. His work on applying industrial-grade humor to make finance ideas irresistible can be found on www.youtube.com/@ed-movie

This article first appeared in the February 2025 issue of Nordic Fintech Magazine. Link