Fintech investments in European banks: a hybrid IT2 fuzzy multidimensional decision-making approach

Abstract

Financial technology (Fintech) makes a significant contribution to the financial system by reducing costs, providing higher quality services and increasing customer satisfaction. Hence, new studies play an essential role to improve Fintech investments. This study evaluates Fintech-based investments of European banking services with an application of an original methodology that considers interval type-2 (IT2) fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory and IT2 fuzzy TOPSIS models. Empirical findings are controlled for consistency by applying the VIKOR method. Moreover, we conduct a sensitivity analysis by considering six distinct cases. This study contributes to the existing literature by identifying the most important Fintech-based investment alternatives to improve the financial performance of European banks. Our empirical findings illustrate that results are coherent, reliable, and identify “competitive advantage” as the most important factor among Fintech-based determinants. Moreover, “payment and money transferring systems” are the most important Fintech-based investment alternatives. It is recommended that, among Fintech-based investments, European banks should mainly focus on payment and money transferring alternatives to attract the attention of customers and satisfy their expectations. This is also believed to have a positive impact on the ease of bank’ receivable collection. Another important point is that Fintech-based investments in money transferring systems could help to decrease costs.

Shadow banking: a bibliometric and content analysis

“…As suggested by Apostoaie and Bilan (2020) and Hodula et al (2017), the impact of regulative arbitrage opportunities on SB could be addressed in this regard. Consistent with Kou et al (2021a), our study suggests that country-specific analyses can provide essential recommendations for improving the financial systems of particular countries. Simultaneously, we acknowledge that analyses of region interconnectedness can generate interesting findings, as SB participants can be registered in one region and operate in another and can offer financial products to regions on a global scale.…”

Initial coin offerings (ICOs): Why do they succeed?

“…The database was built through an API accessible with a premium subscription to the ICO Bench website and comprises 556 projects in the banking/financial sector. This sector was selected due to the impacts it faces from the rise of Fintech companies (Kou et al 2021 ) and its role as a third party that is challenged by new models, such as ICOs (Frizzo-Barker et al 2019 ; Campino et al 2020 ). The database contains several key pieces of information on ICO projects: (i) information on the project itself, namely, the project’s year, information on the whitepaper, project ratings, and location; (ii) information on the campaign, namely, financing threshold amounts, the existence of bonus schemes or pre-sales of tokens; (iii) information on the team, namely, the number of team members, the number of advisors, and the number of projects, in which each member has participated; (iv) information on the use of social media, namely, which social media is used by the project and by the promoters.…”

The effects of managerial ability on firm performance and the mediating role of capital structure: evidence from Taiwan

“…We suggest conducting studies in other industries and regions. For example, researchers may examine the same topic among small and medium-sized enterprises (see for example, Kou et al 2021b) or even banks (see for example, Kou et al 2021a). Second, future studies may consider the issue of firm financial sustainability or stock price crash risk (see for example, Wen et al 2019) instead of firm performance.…”