FAME Pilots Showcase 2025 – Part 2: Advancing Embedded Finance Through Personalization, Collaboration & Public Funding Innovation
On 20 November 2025, the FAME Project held the second session of its Pilots Showcase Series, gathering 25 participants from across Europe. Participants included end-user organisations, big data innovators, research institutions, policy actors, and several European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs). With attendees joining from 15+ cities across Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Cyprus, Türkiye, and Ukraine, the session reflected the diverse ecosystem shaping the future of Embedded Finance.
Across the 90-minute program, four pilots shared how they are applying FAME’s federated data marketplace, decentralized architecture, and AI-powered analytics to solve real commercial and public-sector challenges. What emerged was a shared theme: embedded finance only reaches its full potential when organizations can collaborate securely and intelligently on data.
Setting the Stage: Ernesto Troiano on Why FAME Matters
FAME Project Coordinator Ernesto Troiano (GFT Italia) opened the session with a reminder of why the project exists.
Data sharing, he explained, is not new. But the way it is typically done remains fragmented, proprietary, and misaligned with Europe’s evolving digital strategy. FAME was designed to solve this: a federated, decentralized data marketplace where organizations keep control of their assets, price them transparently using smart contracts, and exchange them in ways that uphold EU-level compliance frameworks.
Troiano walked participants through the marketplace’s foundational pillars. These include decentralized governance, tokenized digital assets, a FAIR-aligned catalog, blockchain-backed provenance, and compliance with GDPR, the Data Act, and the AI Act. His opening made one thing very clear: FAME is laying the groundwork for Europe’s financial data space.
Pilot 1 – Financial Recommendations for Families
Turning retail-finance insight into personalized financial decision-making (led by MC Sonae & Universo)
Pilot 1 showed how companies with large consumer ecosystems can use federated data to strengthen financial intelligence. MC Sonae and Universo explored two use cases: (1) a recommendation engine for families and (2) installment-risk assessment for Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) services, both combining retail behavior, financial profiles, and machine-learning models.
Their technical teams experimented with clustering methods, behavior-based segmentation, and T-Net models for BNPL risk. While early model performance reflected the maturity of the available datasets, the pilot delivered something more valuable: a strategic realization inside Sonae that federated data models could reshape how multiple business units collaborate and share insights.
The team has already indexed two data assets on the FAME Marketplace, and the pilot ignited a broader internal effort to explore cross-sector data federation across the SONAE group.
Pilot 1 takeaway: Although initial predictive performance was limited, the pilot unlocked a new direction for Sonae — the recognition that federated data ecosystems can power more intelligent, more personalized financial services across its entire retail-finance landscape.
Pilot 2 – Embedded Financial Services in a Citizen Wallet
A smart-city wallet that turns everyday mobility into seamless embedded finance (led by DAEM & Novoville)
Pilot 2 brought a very different perspective: what happens when embedded finance is built directly into public-service applications?
The Municipality of Athens and Novoville presented how they’ve woven payments, mobility, and citizen services into a single digital wallet environment. Using years of smart-parking data, payment patterns, and mobility analytics, the pilot demonstrated how citizens can access personalized routing, loyalty programs, parking tools, municipal dashboards, and even public-transport payments, all in one place.
Their narrative made it clear that cities hold immense untapped financial-data value. As mobility becomes more digital and citizens expect frictionless services, embedded finance can help municipalities deliver better user experiences, generate efficiencies, and foster sustainable mobility habits.
Pilot 2 takeaway: This pilot proved that FAME can serve the public sector just as powerfully as the private sector, helping cities turn everyday services into smart, data-driven financial experiences.
Pilot 3 – Personalized Collaborative Intelligence for Embedded Finance
Bringing together data from multiple financial institutions for safer, smarter services (led by BPFI)
Pilot 3—led by the Banking & Payments Federation Ireland (BPFI)—explored one of embedded finance’s toughest challenges: how to combine insights across institutions while preserving privacy, trust, and compliance.
Their solution introduced a federated approach to robo-advisory personalization and anti-money-laundering (AML) intelligence. The team showed how cross-institutional patterns can improve fraud detection, risk scoring, customer insights, and embedded payment intelligence without centralizing sensitive information.
One of the strongest messages from this pilot was the strategic value of collaborative intelligence, enabling banks, fintechs, and public authorities to become data contributors within a regulated, distributed ecosystem.
Pilot 3 takeaway: By proving AML-as-a-service and federated robo-advisory concepts, this pilot showed how the financial sector can strengthen both personalization and fraud-prevention at the same time.
Pilot 4 – EU Funds Application Process Made Easy
Helping banks better support SMEs through data-driven insights on public-funding beneficiaries (led by Inneürope & WeGrant)
Pilot 4 addressed a major barrier for SMEs accessing public funding: the lack of pre-financing, co-financing, and guarantees required to unlock the aid they’ve already won. With award payments often delayed six to twelve months, many SMEs struggle to execute their projects.
The pilot transformed disparate public-funding data into an enriched, high-value dataset banks can use to anticipate financing needs. By classifying awardees, identifying funding gaps, and generating automated financial-product recommendations, the pilot demonstrated a concrete way banks can use data federation to support SMEs more proactively.
Pilot 4 takeaway: This solution showed how public-funding data, once messy and scattered, can become a monetizable asset that helps financial institutions support innovation, accelerate financing decisions, and reach new clients.
A Live Look at the FAME Marketplace
The University of Piraeus (UPRC) closed the session with a live demo of the FAME Marketplace, walking participants through:
- Federation onboarding for organizations
- Publishing data assets (datasets, services, models, educational content)
- Purchasing and trading assets using tokenized smart contracts
- Exploring the Learning Centre for training materials
- Using the Regulation Tool for compliance support
- The integrated AI-powered Chatbot
- An overview of the forthcoming pricing advisory tool
For many participants, it was the moment where theory became reality: the marketplace is live, fully functional, and ready for organizations to join.
Participants were encouraged to explore the platform and begin onboarding their organizations.
Start Exploring the FAME Data Marketplace
Want to try the platform for yourself? Here are quick links to get started:
- 🔗 FAME Data Marketplace
- 🛡️ FAME Federation (Step 1 to joining the Marketplace)
- 📘 Onboarding Guide (How to Join the Marketplace)
- 📚 FAME Learning Centre
- 📂 Data Assets Catalogue
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Author: Bryan Lineweaver (Inneürope)
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