Trends and Directions of Financial Technology (Fintech) in Society and Environment: A Bibliometric Study

Abstract

The contemporary innovations in financial technology (fintech) serve society with an environmentally friendly atmosphere. Fintech covers an enormous range of activities from data security to financial service deliverables that enable the companies to automate their existing business structure and introduce innovative products and services. Therefore, there is an increasing demand for scholars and professionals to identify the future trends and directions of the topic. This is why the present study conducted a bibliometric analysis in social, environmental, and computer sciences fields to analyse the implementation of environment-friendly computer applications to benefit societal growth and well-being. We have used the ‘bibliometrix 3.0’ package of the r-program to analyse the core aspects of fintech systematically. The study suggests that ‘ACM International Conference Proceedings’ is the core source of published fintech literature. China leads in both multiple and single country production of fintech publications. Bina Nusantara University is the most relevant affiliation. Arner and Buckley provide impactful fintech literature. In the conceptual framework, we analyse relationships between different topics of fintech and address dynamic research streams and themes. These research streams and themes highlight the future directions and core topics of fintech. The study deploys a co-occurrence network to differentiate the entire fintech literature into three research streams. These research streams are related to ‘cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, financial technology’, ‘financial industry stability, service, innovation, regulatory technology (regtech)’, and ‘machine learning and deep learning innovations’. The study deploys a thematic map to identify basic, emerging, dropping, isolated, and motor themes based on centrality and density. These various themes and streams are designed to lead the researchers, academicians, policymakers, and practitioners to narrow, distinctive, and significant topics.

Haze pollution reduction in Chinese cities: Has digital financial development played a role?

“…However, as fintech and digital finance have developed at a breakneck pace in the past few years, the environmental benefits of digital finance have become a hot topic among academics. The impact of fintech on the environment, pollutant emissions, green growth, and energy efficiency is more abundantly studied than digital finance ( 18 , 37 , 38 ). These findings suggest that fintech, both globally ( 39 ) and in China ( 40 ), can not only reduce pollution, but also promote sustainable economic and ecological development.…”

“…In June 2013, Alipay launched Yu'E Bao, and then in November, the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) officially proposed “developing digital finance.” Therefore, it is commonly considered that 2013 was the first year of digital finance development in China ( 14 ). Resulting from the rapid development of third-party online payment platforms, represented by Alipay ( 15 – 17 ), China's digital finance has grown rapidly ( 18 , 19 ). According to the report released by the Institute of Digital Finance, Peking University, and Ant Financial Services Group 2 , the average digital finance index (DFI) 3 in Chinese prefecture-level cities has risen from 51.92 in 2011 to 230.73 in 2018, representing a 23.75% annual growth rate.…”

A Hybrid Data Analytics Framework with Sentiment Convergence and Multi-Feature Fusion for Stock Trend Prediction

“…They also reported that the prediction accuracy can be improved when both stock-related news texts and tweets are counted and used as input for stock price prediction. Nasir, Shaukat [42] analyzed Dow Jones index prices based on user sentiment recorded on Twitter and showed that sentiment signals embedded in news are a reliable predictor of stock prices. Polamuri, Srinivas [43] used an RNN model with gated recurrent units to predict stock movements and fused numerical features of stock prices to examine the sentiment polarity of financial news on Twitter.…”

RegTech in public and private sectors: the nexus between data, technology and regulation

“…Bibliometric analysis, where quantitative techniques and new bibliometric software are applied to bibliometric data, is becoming more popular in business research Khan et al, 2021), including in FinTech research (Nasir et al, 2021;Peláez-Repiso et al, 2021). In this paper, we used the VOSviewer software, consistently with previous literature (Donthu et al, 2020;Merediz-Solà & Bariviera, 2019;Nath & Chowdhury, 2021).…”