The financial sector is facing radical transformation. Leveraging digital technologies to offer innovative services, FinTech start-ups are emerging in domains such as asset management, lending, or insurance. Despite increasing investments, the FinTech phenomenon is low on theoretical insights. So far, the offerings of FinTech start-ups have been predominantly investigated from a functional perspective. As a functional perspective does not suffice to fully understand the offerings of FinTech start-ups, we propose a taxonomy of nonfunctional characteristics. Thereby, we restrict our analysis to consumer-oriented FinTech start-ups. Our taxonomy includes 15 dimensions structured along the perspectives interaction, data, and monetization. We demonstrate the applicability of our taxonomy by classifying the offerings of 227 FinTech start-ups and by identifying archetypes via a cluster analysis. Our taxonomy contributes to the descriptive knowledge on FinTech start-ups, enabling researchers and practitioners to analyze the service offerings of FinTech start-up in a structured manner.JEL classification M13 . N2 . N7 . O3
Despite the movement of sustainable consumerism during the last years as well as the crisis of trust evoked by the financial crisis of 2008, ethical banks' market shares remain humble. This study applies models of ethical decision-making to investigate customers' reasons to prefer conventional over ethical banks. First, a model of bank customers' ethical decision-making process in choosing between ethical and conventional banking is set up based on multiple established models from literature. Second, the theoretical model is assessed via data from an online-survey using partial least squares structural equation modelling. Main factors hindering potential customers to switch to ethical banks are missing information, low pressure of the social context, low moral intensity, and a perceived disadvantageous economic effect. However, a good reputation of ethical banks, high concern for the topic, and low scepticism indicate a positive general opinion of ethical banking. These results suggest that more factual information and emotional charging of ethical banking would strengthen demand. On the theoretical side, our analysis shows how to contextualize general models of ethical decision-making to a specific domain and it suggests that the integration of multiple established ethical decision-making models is sensible. Further we suggest that reputation and economic benefitwhich we included as domainspecific extensions of established ethical decision-making modelsare concepts to consider for a general domain-independent extension of ethical decision-making models.
The Web and Grid services frameworks provide a promising infrastructure for cross-organizational use of online services. The use of services in large-scale and cross-organizational environments requires the negotiation of agreements that define these services. Buying at a fine granularity just when a need arises is only feasible if the costs of establishing new agreements are low. Today, negotiation is often a manual process yet many simple online services would allow full or partial automation. The PANDA approach automates decision-making and proposes to specify a negotiation policy, expressing a party's private negotiation strategy, by combining rules and utility functions. In addition, the decision-making problem can be decomposed into different aspects that can be executed by different interacting decision-makers. Using PANDA for policy specification and negotiation decision-making reduces the costs of setting up new services and contracts. Hence, the use of fine-grained ondemand services becomes feasible.
Stress is a major problem in the human society, impairing the well-being, health, performance, and productivity of many people worldwide. Most notably, people increasingly experience stress during human-computer interactions because of the ubiquity of and permanent connection to information and communication technologies. This phenomenon is referred to as technostress. Enterprise systems, designed to improve the productivity of organizations, frequently contribute to this technostress and thereby counteract their objective. Based on theoretical foundations and input from exploratory interviews and focus group discussions, the paper presents a design blueprint for stress-sensitive adaptive enterprise systems (SSAESes). A major characteristic of SSAESes is that biosignals (e.g., heart rate or skin conductance) are integrated as real-time stress measures, with the goal that systems automatically adapt to the users' stress levels, thereby improving human-computer interactions. Various design interventions on the individual, technological, and organizational levels promise to directly affect stressors or moderate the impact of stressors on important negative effects (e.g., health or performance). However, designing and deploying SSAESes pose significant challenges with respect to technical feasibility, social and ethical acceptability, as well as adoption and use. Considering these challenges, the paper proposes a 4-stage step-by-step implementation approach. With this Research Note on technostress in organizations, the authors seek to stimulate the discussion about a timely and important phenomenon, particularly from a design science research perspective.
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