The Financial Services Innovation Lab (FSIL), which serves as an interface between the financial services industry and faculty and students at Georgia Tech, is partnering with Fiserv, a leading global provider of payments and financial services technology with a flagship presence in Georgia, on a new initiative to better understand consumer financial health. Through this new initiative, FSIL researchers will leverage data to generate insights into household financial behavior, which will be relevant to policy makers, consumers, and small businesses.
The three-year partnership, funded by Fiserv, has a goal of increasing financial and payments inclusion.
“With the annual inflation rate in the U.S. at a four-decade high, understanding the financial health of U.S. consumers and offering innovative ways to increase their financial resiliency is paramount,” said Sudheer Chava, Alton M. Costley Chair Professor of Finance at Scheller, who leads FSIL. “By combining insights from unique data from Fiserv with our team’s expertise in household finance and big data analysis, we intend to deliver high-value insights about how major economic trends such as inflation affect U.S. consumers and small businesses.”
As a company that enables money movement for thousands of financial institutions and millions of people and businesses, Fiserv will enable FSIL to construct a comprehensive picture of consumer spending and financial health. This will allow researchers to generate valuable insights about how consumers and small businesses are impacted by sudden economic changes as well as larger economic trends.
“At Fiserv, we believe data can be used for the greater good, to not only understand the financial health of consumers and small businesses, but to actively create opportunities to further financial inclusion,” said Prasanna Dhore, Chief Data Officer at Fiserv. “By partnering with Georgia Tech, we will be able to grow our understanding of the populations and businesses who use our solutions every day, and take steps to positively impact people’s financial lives.”
FSIL was created to establish the Scheller College of Business and Georgia Tech as the hub for finance education, research, and industry. FSIL engages faculty, students, businesses, and practitioners through five interconnected channels: socially relevant research, student learning experiences, events, recruiting, and facilitation of fintech entrepreneurship.
FSIL research focuses on three major streams (1) Responsible and Sustainable Finance (2) FinTech, Crypto and Blockchain and (3) Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) and students from Scheller and across Georgia Tech work on research projects focused in these areas. FSIL supports students at the undergraduate, Masters (Master of Quantitative and Computational Finance (QCF) program and MBA program) and at the doctoral level.
This new partnership with Fiserv will further elevate FSIL research capabilities in household finance, providing better insights that will ultimately benefit the consumer and the community.