This dashboard accompanies three FIRSA research papers on financial technology in the European Union. Explore how European regulators responded to fintech with regulatory sandboxes, how monetary authorities narrate fintech in their speeches, and who owns crypto assets and why.
Sandbox Explorer
Which European countries let fintech firms test with real customers under supervision, and why? Maps, plain-language QCA recipes and the reviewed country coding from the FIRSA working paper.
- Country map with seven selectable data layers
- Adoption and non-adoption recipes, explained
- Build a country profile and see who matches it
FinTech Narratives
How do European monetary authorities talk about fintech? BIS speech classifications reveal a common narrative of managed disruption — innovation encouraged, risks bounded through supervision.
- Compare a country's emphasis to the European aggregate
- Seven narrative frames, from innovation to risk
- Track how a frame rises or falls over time
Crypto Exposure
A statistical model of crypto asset exposure estimated on 26,000+ Eurobarometer responses. Build a profile and see the predicted probability that such a person owns crypto — and test your own financial literacy with the built-in quiz.
- Adjust literacy, confidence and demographics
- Inspect the model coefficients behind the prediction
- Take the financial literacy quiz and compare EU countries
Fintech regulatory sandboxes across the EU and EFTA. Choose a layer to see who runs supervised live testing, who relies on alternative tools, and the conditions behind those choices. Click a country for its full profile.
When the schemes arrived
The thirteen named schemes by launch year, coloured by design type. An early wave (2017–2019) was led by small states; the statutory testing spaces of Spain and Italy arrived in a second wave; Ireland's advisory programme came last, after the label had already spread further than the live-testing design.
The FIRSA working paper uses Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to look for combinations of conditions — recipes — shared by countries with the same outcome. Each card below is one recipe.
How to read a recipe card
Why countries adopt
Baltic full profile
Small, digitally capable states with real fintech activity, an early innovation hub, and Baltic dependent digital integration. The only repeated adoption recipe in the data.
Small-state supervisory learning
A small, high-capacity supervisor adopting without market pressure or a prior hub. Controlled learning rather than market response.
Outside all measured profiles
Adoption with none of the measured conditions present. The structural proxies simply do not capture what drove this case.
Post-socialist translation
A post-socialist state pairing an early innovation hub with an entrepreneurial central bank agenda.
Why countries do not
Financial centres
Small jurisdictions with dense regulated payment sectors that rely on licensing and guidance instead of a sandbox.
Larger CEE payment markets
Bigger post-socialist markets with real payment activity but without high digital-government capacity.
CEE without enabling conditions
Post-socialist states lacking digital capacity, small-state incentives, and early hubs.
Digitally capable CEE, late hubs
Small, digitally capable post-socialist states whose innovation hubs arrived late. Includes Estonia, the deliberate Baltic non-adopter.
Established hub equilibrium
Larger Western economies whose early innovation hubs already do the facilitation work. Italy is the deviant case that legislated a sandbox anyway.
High-capacity alternative instruments
Large fintech markets with high digital capacity and early hubs that channel facilitation through ordinary supervision.
Build a country profile from the five conditions and see what actually happened to the European countries that match it. Profiles containing both adopters and non-adopters are the paper's core finding. Structure alone does not decide the instrument.
The reviewed country coding behind the map, with the calibrated QCA conditions and sources. Full replication materials accompany the FIRSA working paper in the Documentation tab.
Condition definitions
- Fintech pressure (FINTECH) — 1 if PSD2 entities per million are at or above the EU/EEA sample median .
- Digital capacity (DIGICAP) — 1 if EGDI 2024 is at or above the EU/EEA sample median .
- Small state (SMALL) — 1 if population is at or below 6 million .
- Early hub (HUB) — 1 if an innovation hub existed by 2018 .
- Post-socialist DME (DME) — 1 if coded as broad post-socialist dependent market economy .
FIRSA — Understanding FinTech Regulatory Sandbox Development in Europe. EU Horizon MSCA ERA Fellowship, grant No. 101180601. firsa.eu · Data snapshot: July 2026.
How do European monetary authorities talk about FinTech? BIS speech classifications show a common narrative of managed disruption: innovation and efficiency are encouraged, while risks are bounded through supervision and cooperation. Pick a country or institution and a narrative frame to compare its emphasis against the European aggregate.
Narrative scaffold
· European subset of BIS FinTech speech classifications, aggregated from the FIRSA working paper outputs. firsa.eu
Control Panel
Predicted Probability
Statistical Model Coefficients
Financial Literacy Quiz
Answer the six survey questions used in the research, one at a time, and get your own literacy scores together with the model's predicted probability of crypto exposure.
- Six questions: self-assessment plus five quiz items
- Your subjective and objective literacy scores
- Carry your result into the simulator
Answer the financial literacy questions below, one at a time, and see your predicted probability of owning crypto assets based on our statistical model.
Weighted country averages from the survey behind the model. These are the two headline patterns: where crypto exposure is concentrated, and how it lines up with objective financial literacy.
Crypto Exposure
Objective Financial Literacy
Source: Flash Eurobarometer 525 (2023)
The dashboard is based on three FIRSA research papers. The regulatory sandbox paper documents the comparative analysis behind the Sandbox Explorer; the narratives paper documents the speech classification behind FinTech Narratives; the crypto exposure paper documents the model behind the simulator and quiz.
The Sandbox Explorer presents the country coding, typology and Qualitative Comparative Analysis from the FIRSA working paper below. The paper documents the outcome definition, condition calibration, solution pathways and case narratives behind the maps and recipe cards.
FIRSA — Understanding FinTech Regulatory Sandbox Development in Europe. EU Horizon MSCA ERA Fellowship, grant No. 101180601.
FinTech Narratives visualises the BIS speech classifications documented in the FIRSA working paper below — "Narratives of FinTech: The Political Economy of Disruptive Discourse." The paper explains the corpus, the seven narrative frames, and the classification behind the theme scores and trends.
FIRSA — Understanding FinTech Regulatory Sandbox Development in Europe. EU Horizon MSCA ERA Fellowship, grant No. 101180601.
The simulator is based on the crypto exposure model and methodology documented in the paper below. This document explains the specification, estimation strategy and supporting analysis behind the dashboard outputs.
