Regulatory Risk in Green FinTech: Comparative Insights from Central Europe

Green fintech merges sustainable finance with data-intensive innovation, but national translations of EU rules can create regulatory risk. This study examines how such risk manifests in Central Europe and which policy tools mitigate it. We develop a three-dimension framework—regulatory clarity and scope, supervisory consistency, and innovation facilitation—and apply a comparative qualitative design to Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, and Poland. Using a common EU baseline, we compile coded national snapshots from primary legal texts, supervisory documents, and recent scholarship. Results show material cross-country variation in labelling practice, soft-law use, and testing infrastructure: Hungary combines central-bank green programmes with an innovation hub/sandbox; Slovakia aligns with ESMA and runs hub/sandbox, though the green-fintech pipeline is nascent; Czechia applies a principles-based safe harbour and lacks a national sandbox; and Poland relies on a virtual sandbox and binding interpretations with limited soft law. These choices shape approval timelines, retail penetration, and cross-border portability of green-labelled products. We conclude with a policy toolkit: labelling convergence or explicit safe harbours, a cross-border sandbox federation, ESRS/ESAP-ready proportionate disclosures, consolidation of recurring interpretations into soft law, investment in suptech for green-claims analytics, and inclusion metrics in sandbox selection.