The banking sector has been subject to fundamental changes as digitalization is enabling novel technologydriven banking services and is creating new customer demands. While banks face sluggish innovation processes, fintechs take advantage of the digital era, delivering customer-centric solutions. Although banks have realized that cooperation with fintechs is a key approach to foster innovation, they struggle to address the associated challenges. Yet, there has been very little research into this phenomenon, so as to establish best practices, because neither bank-fintech cooperation, nor associated and relevant characteristics have been evaluated. However, especially from an economic and financial perspective it is crucial to close this research gap to better understand how technology-driven organizations and cooperating with them reshapes the financial sector and therefore entire economies. Thus, we propose a theoretically founded and empirically proven taxonomy. Based on the literature, 136 real-world cases, and 12 expert interviews, our results suggest structuring and describing bank-fintech cooperation through 13 dimensions. Further, the empirical examination allows for the identification of prevailing cooperation patterns. Our findings contribute to theory development on fintechs, their integration into the banking sector, and the crossorganizational cooperation research area. This paper also has practical implications for both banks and fintechs, and opens promising avenues for future research.

Multi-sided platforms are omnipresent in today's digital world. However, establishing a platform includes challenges: The platform utility usually increases with the number of participants. At an early stage, potential participants expect the platform utility to be low and lack an incentive to join (i.e., "chicken and egg" problem). Blockchain-enabled utility tokens hold the promise to overcome this problem. They supposedly provide a suitable financial incentive for their owners to join the platform as soon as possible. In the first half of 2018, investors seemed to believe in the presumption and spent more than US$ 17.6 billion in token sales. To date, we know little about this financial incentive in the context of the token economy. For this purpose, we model the token value development and the associated incentives in a multi-sided blockchain-enabled platform. The resulting findings suggest that blockchain-enabled utility tokens can help to overcome the "chicken and egg" problem. However, these tokens lead to contradictory incentives for platform participants, and can even inhibit platform usage. The contribution of our work is twofold: First, we develop one of the first models for token value development. Second, our research contributes to a deeper understanding of the utility token's financial incentive.

The phenomenon of a blockchain use case called initial coin offering (ICO) is drawing increasing attention as a novel funding mechanism. ICO is a crowdfunding type that utilizes blockchain tokens to allow for truly peer-to-peer investments. Although more than $7bn has been raised globally via ICOs as at 2018, the concept and its implications are not yet entirely understood. The research lags behind in providing in-depth analyses of ICO designs and their long-term success. We address this research gap by developing an ICO taxonomy, applying a cluster analysis to identify prevailing ICO archetypes, and providing an outlook on the token value market performance for individual archetypes. We identify five ICO design archetypes and display their secondary market development from both a short-term and a long-term perspective. We contribute to an in-depth understanding of ICOs and their implications. Further, we offer practitioners tangible design and success indications for future ICOs.