Fintech

by

Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn

• LAST MODIFIED: 20 March 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199743292-0329

Introduction

The term “fintech” (or “FinTech”) refers to the intersection of finance and technology. Scholarly literature on fintech ranges in scope depending on how broadly or narrowly both finance and technology, as well as their intersections, are conceived. At one end are business, economic, legal, and technical studies examining fintech as specific combinations of digital technologies in financial products largely emerging in the wake of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. Fintech is studied at this one end of a broader spectrum as a set of particular post-2008 applications of novel digital technologies in banking, insurance, and securities markets. Fintechs considered here are typically the big data, blockchain, and other sets of digital technologies that World Economic Forum head Klaus Schwab has dubbed to be part of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. At the other end of the fintech conceptual spectrum is scholarship in fields such as anthropology, geography, and political economy that intersect in the social studies of finance (SSF), where fintech is considered in far broader cultural, historical, political, and socio-technical contexts and intersections that involve a greater variety of products, practices, and peoples. Both ends of the “fintech scholarly spectrum” include contributions from, as well as contributions to, debates in international relations (IR) such as the “new materialist” and practices turns. This bibliography provides a snapshot of rapidly evolving scholarship on fintech linking a few of the narrower industry and practitioner guides to fintech to the far wider scholarship that has considered finance and technology from a variety of social-scientific perspectives. It contextualizes fintech in and across multiple temporalities that bridge the past, present, and future. It situates fintech socio-technically, linking the technical and the social, as well as geo-economically, bridging economics and international politics. The overall objective of this bibliography is to provide a resource for pointing students and scholars in directions useful for learning what currently exists in order to build on and further deepen understanding of the intersections of finance and technology. What this bibliography is not intended as is an exhaustive account of all fintech literature. It largely refrains from including individual book chapters and lists only introductory articles to journal special issues rather than all contributions to such collections. This bibliography is structured in sections that begin broadly and move to more specific subsections. At times even further specification is made in sub-subsections covering specific fintechs, notably including the focus of the author’s own research into one of the infamous fintechs arising since 2008: blockchains and their applications to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Even in this specific case, much literature is left out, and the reader is recommended to consult further Oxford Bibliography articles, including “Blockchain and Communication,” as well as those on other related digital technologies, most notably “Big Data and International Law” and “Big Data in Political Science Research.” Beyond the journals cited in the article, there are also now at least four journals dedicated solely to the topic (FinTech, Journal of Banking and Financial Technology, Journal of FinTech, Journal of FinTech and Artificial Intelligence).

Industry and Practitioner Guides

A series of “guides” provide practical “hands-on” introductions to fintech and its various divisions into “insurtech,” or insurance technology; “paytech,” or payments technology; and “regtech,” or regulatory technology. Handbooks like Liaw 2021 assemble the various elements of fintech together into volumes providing state-of-play overviews of what is largely conceived as a post–global financial crisis phenomenon, most prominently exemplified by the post-2009 rise of blockchain technology, chronicled in Chuen and Deng 2017.

• Chishti, S., and J. Barberis. The FinTech Book: The Financial Technology Handbook for Investors, Entrepreneurs and Visionaries. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2016.

  DOI: 10.1002/9781119218906

  As the subtitle indicates, this is a practitioner guide for financial services practitioners, but also one that provides a useful early overview defining and charting out what fintech is and could be.

• Chuen, D. L. K., and R. H. Deng. Handbook of Blockchain, Digital Finance, and Inclusion: Cryptocurrency, FinTech, InsurTech, Regulation, ChinaTech, Mobile Security, and Distributed Ledger. London: Academic Press, 2017.

  Provides a wide-ranging overview of post-2008 developments in the digitization of finance as part of international efforts to bring banking and insurance in particular to populations previously “excluded” from such financial services. The second part focuses on China, which hitherto had been largely overlooked.

• Liaw, T., ed. The Routledge Handbook of FinTech. New York: Routledge, 2021.

  Another broad-ranging survey of post-2008 fintech applications across banking, payments, and lending, as well as automated advisory services. Includes a useful financial section on regulatory issues, including some international comparisons.

• Van der Linden, S. L., S. M. Millie, N. Anderson, and S. Chishti. The InsurTech Book: The Insurance Technology Handbook for Investors, Entrepreneurs and Fintech Visionaries. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2018.

  Zooming in on digital insurance, this is another example of the type of guide for and by financial industry practitioners that is nicely international in scope with a novel emphasis on regionalization.