A Behaviorally-Informed Financial Simulation Model
Country: US, Global | Year: 2024-2025
A Platform for Research, Policy, and Innovation
Overview
FinSim is an innovative microsimulation tool developed by sistemaFutura in partnership with a leading think tank and a major financial institution. Designed to model the financial lives of American households, FinSim blends behavioral science with computational modeling to simulate how families navigate life events and financial decisions over time. It has already been used to assess the impact of federal legislation and community programs, and its applications continue to grow.
FinSim empowers policymakers, financial institutions, and researchers to design smarter, more responsive interventions that can improve financial wellbeing at scale.
Complex Challenge
Pervasive Financial Instability
Many families in the United States face difficulties making ends meet: struggling to save for the future or even to break free from their debts. This challenge arises from the complex interaction between the labor market, government policies, consumer culture, individual choices, and behavioral biases.
Our Solution
FinSim – A Behavioral Microsimulation Model
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FinSim offers a novel approach to understanding financial behavior through the lens of both empirical data and behavioral science. The model simulates household financial and life decisions—such as employment changes, family transitions, and savings behavior—within real-world policy and market contexts.
Its modular design enables custom scenarios, from federal policy shifts to local program impacts, using extensible components like marriage/divorce dynamics, job transitions, retirement planning, and more. Non-technical stakeholders can explore these scenarios via an intuitive user interface, while the backend computational engine performs deep analysis, surfaces leverage points, and supports data-driven decision-making.
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Dashboard from FinSim, a customizable financial simulation:
​This dashboard presents an overview of the user interface FinSim. It incorporates three key aspects: a map view displaying the geographic effects of selected policies on community-level outcomes such as retirement readiness and earnings, financial indicators like median household net worth over time or percentage of households that are ready to retire, and a column on the left side where the user can adjust the simulation parameters—including location, policy programs, and community outcomes—to generate tailored financial scenarios. Overall, By visualizing long-term financial trends and policy impacts, the dashboard empowers decision-makers to design more effective and equitable economic interventions in a friendly and accesible way.
Diagram of FinSim’s system architecture
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The Opportunity
Seeking Promising Partnerships
FinSim is under active development. We have a fully working prototype, but there is always more to add.
We welcome partnership in two areas:
Researchers with relevant expertise interested in integrating their findings into the inner workings of the model. In exchange for insights to improve our model, we offer a free copy of the code so partners can use it in their own research.
Funders or clients interested in extending the micro-simulation model to their areas of interest. For instance, for financial institutions FinSim can include a bespoke model of how their products and services would fare in changing market and policy conditions. We also build on this base for related social problems; for example, we are currently adding modules to map how life events and socio-economic conditions affect people’s mental health and contribute to deaths of despair.
FinSim has the potential to reshape how we understand and address financial vulnerability in the U.S. By modeling human behavior in all its complexity, it offers a powerful lens to test ideas, optimize policies, and design more equitable financial products. With the right partners, FinSim can become a foundational tool for building a more resilient and inclusive economy.