On June 24th, 2026, the FinTech Foundation and Global Finance & Technology Network (GFTN) announced the creation of the FinTech Regulatory Futures Index (FRFI). The FRFI will be housed at the FinTech Foundation, a nonprofit organization located in Washington, D.C., which organizes the DC Fintech Week event, and supported by the GFTN network located in Singapore that was formed by the MAS in 2024.
What the Index Measures
The FRFI will score jurisdictions across five dimensions: regulatory clarity and comprehensiveness, consumer protection and market conduct, innovation enablement and market infrastructure, market access and economic opportunity, and resilience and integrity. According to a roundtable description published by Georgetown University’s Chris Brummer, who co-founded the initiative, the methodology draws on primary sources, i.e. statutes, supervisory guidance, licensing frameworks, and enforcement records, rather than survey-based perception data. Five specialist working groups, comprising regulators, central bankers, academics, and industry practitioners from more than 30 jurisdictions, are developing the scoring criteria, overseen by an Executive Council.
The two organizations plan to combine the convening power of DC Fintech Week with GFTN’s own event portfolio, including the Singapore FinTech Festival, the Point Zero Forum in Zurich, and the 3i Summit in Ghana. The draft methodology will go through a public comment period before its formal unveiling at DC Fintech Week in October 2026.
“Regulatory benchmarking should not be a black box.” said Professor Chris Brummer, Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Financial Technology at Georgetown University Law Center and Founder of the Fintech Foundation. “The FRFI is designed to bring methodology into the open — combining legal, economic, technological, and market expertise to build a framework that improves over time.”
Why Now
The Fintech Regulatory Futures Index (FRFI) launch statement points to governments “reassessing how to regulate AI-enabled financial services, digital assets, embedded finance, real-time payments, cross-border data flows, and new forms of market infrastructure.” Recent developments in each of those areas illustrate the pace of change the index is meant to track.
In digital assets, the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) transitional period closes on July 1, 2026. ESMA confirmed in April that no member state may extend national grace periods beyond that date. By June, roughly 210 firms held full MiCA authorization, against more than 1,200 entities that previously operated under national crypto registrations across the bloc — a conversion rate that has already pushed some exchanges to exit the EU market.
In AI-enabled financial services, the EU AI Act’s high-risk obligations for financial-sector use cases like credit scoring, insurance underwriting, fraud detection tools, etc. become enforceable on August 2, 2026. The European Banking Authority’s November 2025 mapping exercise found no major contradictions with existing banking law, but also identified gaps the AI Act does not resolve, including human oversight and data governance requirements that sit outside frameworks such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act. A proposed Digital Omnibus package could push some deadlines to December 2027, though it has not been adopted.
“As AI adoption accelerates and tokenisation gains acceptance, governance frameworks across the global fintech ecosystem must keep evolving in step.” said Sopnendu Mohanty, Group Chief Executive Officer, GFTN and former Chief FinTech Officer at the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
As for real-time payments and cross-border infrastructure, Africa’s regulatory landscape remains fragmented even as instrastructure scales. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), backed by Afreximbank, the African Union, and the AfCFTA Secretariat, connected more than 19 central banks and 150 commercial banks by early 2026. Yet AfricaNenda, a continental payments advocacy organization, has called for a Payment Services Directive for Africa to address what it describes as divergent licensing regimes and limited cross-border coordination. Separately, Kenya and Rwanda signed a license-passporting memorandum of understanding in March 2026, while Nigeria’s central bank has proposed a similar passporting framework with Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa.
Each example shows regulatory environments moving on different timelines, under different legal architectures, with different enforcement postures — the kind of variation a standardized index is designed to make comparable.
What Remains Unconfirmed
The Fintech Foundation and GFTN have not publicly stated how often the FRFI will be updated once published. The announcement and related materials describe a one-time methodology development process culminating in a launch at DC Fintech Week in October 2026, but so far no source specifies an annual, biennial, or other recurring publication schedule. Organizations operating similar global indices, such as the World Bank’s Doing Business successor projects or the Global Innovation Index, typically publish on annual or biennial cycles, so one may suggest similar provisions for the new benchmark, but the FRFI’s update frequency has not yet been confirmed by its organizers.
Background
The Fintech Foundation is led by Georgetown University Law Center professor Chris Brummer. GFTN is headed by Sopnendu Mohanty, formerly chief fintech officer at the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Both organizations stated the index is designed to support peer learning among regulators rather than function as a simplistic ranking system.
