Governing Financial Innovation Through Institutional Learning: Lessons from Romania’s Fintech Innovation Hub

The rapid digital transformation of the financial sector has driven supervisory authorities to develop new tools for engaging with fintech innovation. Among these, Innovation Hubs have become essential mechanisms for improving regulatory dialogue, interpretive clarity, and institutional learning. This article examines the Romanian Fintech Innovation Hub (FIH), launched by the National Bank of Romania (NBR) as a consultative platform to support fintech and payment service providers operating within complex legal environments. Using a qualitative, single-case methodology (2019–2023), the study draws on internal NBR documentation, anonymized supervisory materials, and interviews with fintech founders, oversight officers, and policy specialists. The analysis evaluates the Hub’s performance across five key dimensions: stakeholder engagement, regulatory learning, policy calibration, innovation barriers, and institutional reflexivity. Findings reveal that while the Hub strengthened supervisory understanding and enhanced trust-based interaction, its influence on rulemaking and market access was limited by structural and procedural constraints, including resource gaps and the absence of a regulatory sandbox function. Nonetheless, the Romanian experience demonstrates how institutional learning can emerge even in bank-dominated markets, generating internal adaptation and improving fintech compliance readiness. Comparative insights from Hungary and Italy highlight the advantages of modular, risk-proportionate engagement models that integrate advisory and testing functions. The study contributes to the theory of adaptive regulation by proposing that innovation hubs function as feedback loop mechanisms linking market experimentation with supervisory evolution, offering a replicable model for small and emerging financial systems seeking to balance innovation facilitation with prudential soundness and legal certainty. As such, it provides generalizable insights for central banks and government policymakers on developing FinTech hubs that balance innovation facilitation with prudential soundness and legal certainty.