The Regulator Vanishes – Consumer Financial Protection in the US Today
Join us as CFI and Golub Center for Finance and Policy sit down to discuss the current state of Consumer Financial Protections on May 13th at Sloan.
Credit where it’s due
MIT Sloan’s Christopher Palmer has produced new insights about household finance, thanks to razor-sharp empirical studies.
Household Finance Conference
Jonathan Parker will give the Keynote Address at the upcoming Household Finance Conference, hosted by the Financial Services Innovation Lab at Georgia Tech and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta on March 27-28th, 2025
Ideas Made to Matter: 4 ways that AI and tech are reshaping finance
Generative AI and financial data are opening up the digital economy to more consumers and small businesses, but crypto concerns remain.
Our team in the News:
Dismantling the CFPB would turn the consumer finance world into the 'wild, wild west,' its former director says – A new article from Business Insider, February 10th 2025
2025 Annual FinTech Conference
CFI Director Jonathan Parker will moderate a panel of industry leaders to examine how AI-driven personalization and data analytics are revolutionizing wealth management in this week's student-led Annual FinTech Conference.
Consumer Credit Markets from Christopher Palmer
MIT Sloan’s Christopher Palmer discusses how consumer credit markets impact household finance, investment and policy in the latest issue of the NBER’s The Reporter
Parker, Schoar and Sun awarded the 2024 TIAA Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security from the TIAA Institute
For the paper Retail Financial Innovation and Stock Market Dynamics: The Case of Target Date Funds
Today in the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance: Financial Advice and Investor Beliefs: Experimental Evidence on Active vs. Passive Strategies
A new study from Antoinette Schoar (MIT Sloan) and Yang Sun (Brandeis International School of Business)
The Rational Reminder Podcast – June 20th, 2024 with Antoinette Schoar
This week Antoinette Schoar joined the hosts of The Rational Reminder Podcast for a discussion about consumer finance, crypto, target date funds and more.
Ideas Made to Matter: Lending standards can be too tight for too long, research finds
When the lending market is too tight, competition among lenders can lead to excessive due diligence, prolonging a credit crunch.
Ideas Made to Matter: How retirement saving incentives amplify wealth gaps in the U.S.
Changing how more than $300 billion of annual incentives are allocated could close the racial gap in retirement savings by a third, a new study finds.
How credit is allocated during booms can predict busts
New MIT Sloan research finds firms producing domestic goods and services most strongly predict potential economic slowdowns and systemic crises, with implications for policymakers looking to bolster the economy and safeguard the financial system.
Brazil Teams Up with Sloanies to Combat Retirement Crisis
In late January, Brazil launched the RendA+ treasury bond, a new retirement security adapted from the work of School of Management Distinguished Professor of Finance and Nobel Prize in Economics laureate Robert C. Merton, PhD ’70, and Arun Muralidhar, PhD ’92.
Our mission
The purpose of our research is to equip individuals, financial institutions and policy makers with better models and tools to navigate the changing world of consumer finance.
New technologies – from artificial intelligence and big data to Web3 and mobile devices – are disrupting consumer financial markets and causing significant changes in the way people save, borrow, buy insurance, or make payments.
The greater commoditization and decentralization of financial decisions and the rise of new intermediaries means that the average consumer is increasingly managing financial risks and rewards individually. This is changing not only the market for consumer financial products, but also for financial advice, guidance, and information. The Consumer Finance Initiative, led by faculty at Sloan, will build an understanding of the markets, benefits, best practices, and best regulation as technologies change the consumer financial market.
While topics will evolve, our current focus is on recent important innovations such as payments technologies including cryptocurrencies, the rise of new solutions to financial advice that rely on more automatization and algorithmic customization, and AI-based underwriting. Our team also studies advances and socialization of retail investing, retirement savings and the radical customization of investment funds, insur-tech and telematics.