Welcome to the Global Institute of Finance, Technology, and Society.

We are living through a period in which artificial intelligence, digital platforms, financial technologies, and data-driven systems are reshaping the foundations of economic and social life. They are changing how firms organise production, how markets process information, how households make decisions, how intelligent systems evolve and interact, how governments design policy, and how societies understand trust, risk, opportunity, and responsibility.

These changes cannot be understood from any single discipline alone. Computer science and data science give us new tools of prediction, optimisation, and automation. Economics and finance help us understand incentives, markets, institutions, and risk. Business research connects technology to organisations, strategy, and decision-making. Law, ethics, and the social sciences help us ask what should be built, for whom, under what rules, and with what consequences. The central questions of the digital age are therefore not merely technical questions. They are questions about systems, institutions, and society, involving both humans and intelligent machines.

It is in this spirit that we launch the Global Institute of Finance, Technology, and Society (GIFTS) at Nanyang Technological University. Jointly anchored in Nanyang Business School and the College of Computing and Data Science, and working with partners across NTU and around the world, GIFTS is designed as a transdisciplinary platform for research, education, industry collaboration, and policy engagement at the intersection of AI, digital economics, finance, technology, and society.

Our ambition is not simply to study technological change after it happens. It is to help shape the intellectual and institutional foundations needed to understand it before it becomes deeply embedded in markets, organisations, and society. We aim to advance rigorous research on AI for business and economics, digital finance, on-chain and agentic economies, trusted digital infrastructure, economic world models, data-driven decision systems, human–machine interaction, the social sciences of AI agents, technology and data for sustainability, and the governance of intelligent markets and platforms. These are areas where scholarship, policy, and practice must evolve together.

GIFTS will support frontier research and innovation, but it will also serve as a bridge. We seek to bring together economists, computer scientists, data scientists, business scholars, engineers, legal scholars, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders. Through academic programmes, global conferences and dialogues, joint platforms and data infrastructure, policy roundtables and white papers, and innovation and translation activities, GIFTS aims to convene communities that might otherwise remain separated by disciplinary, institutional, or geographic boundaries.

Singapore is an especially fitting home for such an institute. It is a trusted global hub for finance, technology, governance, and international exchange. It combines policy seriousness with openness to innovation, and it sits at the heart of a dynamic Asia-Pacific region where digital transformation is unfolding at extraordinary speed. GIFTS aspires to contribute to Singapore’s broader leadership in AI and FinTech by complementing technological advances with rigorous economic, business, and social-science understanding.

We approach this mission with humility. The future of AI and digital finance will not be determined by any one institute, country, firm, or discipline. But we believe that serious scholarship, open collaboration, and responsible innovation can help societies make better choices. The task ahead is to build systems that are not only more intelligent, but also more trustworthy, inclusive, resilient, and aligned with human values and welfare.

GIFTS is founded on that conviction. We invite scholars, students, policymakers, industry partners, and members of the wider community to join us in building a global platform for understanding and shaping the intelligent digital economy.

Prof Lin William Cong

Founding Director, GIFTS
President's Chair Professor, NTU
Associate Dean and Professor (Finance Division), NBS
Professor (Data Science & AI Divisions), CCDS 
Professor (Economics Division, by courtesy), SSS