A Bibliometric Analysis of Fintech: A Retrospective

Abstract

FinTechs are a classic example of technological innovations competing with the conventional system of service provision, in this case, the provision of financial services. This paper mainly aims to study the growth of FinTechs by measuring certain vital indicators from the year: 2008 - 2020. This paper mainly tries to focus on three major research questions which are to study the FinTech pattern of annual publications and citations. Then to study who are the most prolific FinTech authors in this domain. And finally to analyze the major types of publications, keyword analysis, and countries. This study is quantitative with a descriptive design. This study is purely a bibliometric study on FinTech's based on a survey of 1628 papers in one traditional peer-reviewed academic database. The study mainly concentrates only on the Scopus database. Here the analysis is mainly done with the help of VOS viewer software using two major techniques which are: co-authorship analysis and co-occurrence analysis. From the analysis, it can be said that over the years there has been an upward trend in the number of FinTech publications arising from one document in the year 2008 to 839 documents in the year 2020. Similarly, most of the publications in the FinTech research have been carried out by computer science domain with 829 documents, followed by Business, Management, and Accounting, Engineering domain with a total of 542 documents followed by Engineering domain with a total of 381 documents. After a detailed co-authorship analysis, it can be observed that in terms of most prolific authors concerning a large number of documents are author Li J. with 12 documents followed by author Arner D.W. with 10 documents. Similarly, in terms of total citations concerning co-authorship analysis, it can be said that author Gomber. P is leading the list with total citations of 292 followed by author Kauffman R.J. with 189 citations then followed by author Shin Y.J. with 162 citations. Based on the analysis concerning countries with a large number of documents are China with 246 documents followed by the US with 211 documents and UK with 136 documents. Similarly based on the co-authorship analysis concerning citations among countries are the United States with 1904 citations followed by China with 1144 citations and United Kingdom with 986 citations. From the co-occurrence analysis based on the occurrence of all keywords, the keyword "FinTech" with 1006 occurrences is leading the list followed by the keyword "Blockchain" with 301 occurrences and the keyword "Commerce" with 197 occurrences. Hence it can be concluded that more studies can be done from the Business, Management, and Accounting domain. Similarly, further research has to be explored in the FinTech area by emerging economies like India, Japan, Singapore, and other countries. Overall this research will be an eyeopener for many researchers, practitioners, and corporates who are rigorously involved in the field of FinTech research. Similarly, the policymakers and respective Governments can witness the growing trends and can make vital decisions related to FinTechs in the upcoming future.