Traditional banking has been gaining momentum and trust throughout the past decades. Banks have been leading economies and enjoying a monopoly in most of the global financial systems. They proved to be successful financial intermediaries; they have been attracting savings and channeling them to profitable investments.
Nevertheless, during the last decade, globalization and technology have been accelerating at a mind-blowing pace, so that traditional banking is striving to cope with it. Furthermore, technology revolutionizes the financial and banking systems, taking them into a completely new era of business. The internet and mobile devices became the core elements of people’s lifestyles. They have disrupted all the businesses’ sectors whether in developed or developing countries. The financial services industry is no exception; the digital revolution is transforming the way customers access financial products and services. Technology in the financial sector has been moving slowly and steadily from the internet to mobile banking and is now taking its road towards internet banking, in addition to the emergence of e-commerce platforms and multiple other forms.
Consequently, at this intersection of finance and technology in today’s globalized world lies a phenomenon that has been accelerating and reshaping the industry’s status quo – it is called FinTech.
FinTech concept has received rudimentary research, with almost all the concerned stakeholders focusing more on embedding it in their systems. Nevertheless, growing interest in finTech research is expected to be reflected on the academic literature in the near future to fill in the current knowledge deficit about this field with its evolving concepts and perceptions.
FinTech proved to be an evolving and contentious concept. Opinions varied between limiting the finTech concept to the newly emerging technology-based financial companies or expanding it to include the existing incumbents if they are innovating a new technology-based service or product. Given the differences in the mentioned opinions, definitions generally agree that finTech refers to companies that develop financial services and products by relying on much more intense use of information technology.
