The DOLFINS project addresses the global challenge of making the financial system better serve society by placing scientific evidence and citizens participation at the centre of the policy process in finance. The project strives to give scientific evidence and citizens participation central roles in the policy process concerning finance. DOLFINS will focus on two crucial and interconnected policy areas that will shape the public debate in the coming 5 years: How to achieve financial stability and how to facilitate the long-term investments required by the transition to a more sustainable, more innovative, less unequal and greener EU economy. The expected impact is to achieve crucial advances in reshaping the policy process to overcome the financial and political crisis faced by the EU. We will deliver quantitative tools to evaluate policies aiming to tame systemic risk and to foster sustainable investing. The tools will be based on fundamental research combining network models and algorithmic game theory with broader economic insights. This approach can provide a more satisfactory understanding of credit, risk and sustainable investments in an interconnected world. We will investigate how to engage citizens in the early stage of the policy making process and will develop evidence-based narratives in order to better shape policies in the public interest. To this end, our project will take advantage of semantic web technologies, big data and ICT in general. Given the highly technical nature of key issues in finance, we will explore how ICT and art can facilitate citizens’ engagement through innovative narratives, leading to better coordinated actions of stakeholders.