Sustainable Digital Finance: The Role of FinTech, InsurTech & Blockchain for Shaping the World for the Better

Abstract

The digital finance revolution, which is often termed the “FinTech Revolution”, is currently changing the financial services industry through innovative solutions, often developed by startup and Big Tech companies. The financial sector is one of the key pillars of all economic transactions in general and sustainability specifically. As is so often the case: money is power. Innovative examples range from digital supply chain finance enabled agricultural and fashion value chains bridging Western and African as well as Asian countries, digital currency fueled smart meters for schools in Africa, digital investment marketplaces for forest tokens to crowdfunding enabled entrepreneurship in Asia and South America. Digital innovation in financial services is changing the way how financial resources can be accessed, distributed, and managed. This paper analyzes approaches from the emerging field of FinTech, InsurTech and blockchain at the intersection of sustainability. By reading through almost one-hundred and fifty papers from academia and practice as well as analyzing hundreds of start-ups in this field, the major building blocks were derived and a future research and innovation agenda was developed. The Appendix which is mentioned in this paper is downloadable online: www.sustainable-digital-finance.org. The results indicate that the topic is of great emerging interest. The areas of the focus are energy management, financial services, governments/NGOs, and transportation as well as some other relevant sectors that hold great potential and in which the combination of business and sustainability benefits is more obvious than ever enabled through innovative technology. The analysis reveals that future research and innovation areas might be fruitful in (1) novel ways for an integrated measuring of business and sustainability benefits, (2) novel sustainable cross-industry ecosystems and business models relying on new FinTech, InsurTech and blockchain enabled products and services, (3) new forms of organizational designs such as autonomous distributed organizations and processes built on new governance mechanisms and (4) novel FinTech, InsurTech, and blockchain applications for Sustainable Digital Finance Ecosystems.