Reframing supply chain finance in an era of reglobalization: On the value of multi-sided crowdfunding platforms

Sustainable supply chain finance through digital platforms: a pathway to green entrepreneurship

“…Owing to the technological developments, internet enabled FinTech platforms have gained remarkable attention among the public investors and SME entrepreneurs as an innovative means of investment and funding. There exists only a limited number of studies that considered the use of platform financing in the SC context (Reza-Gharehbagh et al, 2021;Yu et al, 2020;Fatehi & Wagner, 2019;Gao et al, 2018;Yan et al, 2020;Reza-Gharehbagh et al, 2020a). Fatehi and Wagner (2019) investigated the role of a crowdfunding platform and revenue sharing contract in maximizing the net present value of a firm, considering the investors' participation constraints and the platform's service fee.…”

“…They found that the popularity of P2P platforms is correlated to the government's support, the platform's financial attributes (e.g., the interest rate under DF and equity exchange ratio under EF), and the competition degree of SCs. Reza-Gharehbagh et al (2021) are among the first who investigated the role of hybrid government regulation in promoting crowdfunding MSPs and indigenous innovation strategies in an era of reglobalization. They found that a regulated platform financing mechanism could reduce the power disparity among small investors and local SC while enabling the host government to achieve its reglobalization goals.…”

“…With the growth of information technology and the emergence of innovative SCF solutions (Choi, 2020;Gao et al, 2018;Reza-Gharehbagh et al, 2021;Yu et al, 2020), some governments decided to partner with digital platforms and offer the capital-constrained SCs access to platform financing solutions to fund their GNPD activities. As a result, multi-sided Fintech platforms (MSPs) have rapidly replaced the conventional SCF schemes and gained substantial traction among the capital constrained SCs engaged in the green entrepreneurship.…”

“…Offering a diverse range of regulated entrepreneurial financing facilities, such as debt financing (DF) and equity financing (EF), the MSPs connect the SME entrepreneurs to a crowd of investors and facilitate their access to a portfolio of SCF solutions (Reza-Gharehbagh et al, 2021;Yang et al, 2017;Zheng et al, 2020). The platform financing has three key features that motivate the SME entrepreneurs to participate in the regulated GNPD programs: (i) needless of conventional intermediaries and associated challenges, the MSPs play a match-making role and enable SME entrepreneurs and investors to directly connect via a regulated digital platform; (ii) while decreasing the funding and investment costs, the MSPs enable the SME entrepreneurs and investors to reduce their fundraising and investment risks by channeling the accumulated capital into different streams (e.g., DF and EF); (iii) unlike the conventional DF mechanisms, the platform-based EF schemes are gaining significant popularity among the green entrepreneurs.…”

“…To achieve their environmental and social welfare objectives, the governments may have to partially bear these costs (through greening costs sharing programs) and support the greening efforts of SME entrepreneurs (Xia et al, 2020). The third challenge relates to making a balance between the government's economic influence and social welfare objectives when devising an intervention policy (Reza-Gharehbagh et al, 2021).…”