The Innovation Mechanisms of Fintech Start-Ups: Insights from Swift's Innotribe Competition

Abstract

The emergence of nascent forms of financial technology around the globe is driven by efforts to deconstruct and reimagine business models historically embedded within financial services. Entrepreneurial endeavors to this end are diverse. Indeed, the propensity towards complexity across the fintech landscape is considerable. Bridging as it does a diverse range of financial services, markets, innovations, industry participants, infrastructures and technologies. This study aims to improve the comprehension of the global fintech landscape. It is based on the analysis of start-ups who participated in SWIFT’s Innotribe competition over a three-year period. We used cluster analysis to group 402 fintech start-up firms, and then selected representative cases to create a foundational understanding of the structure of the fintech landscape. We found that six clusters capture the variety of firms and their activities. The main findings of this work are: (1) the development of fintech clusters to classify core services, business infrastructures and underlying component technologies, which characterize the fintech landscape; (2) an analysis of how fintechs synthesize different technologies to restructure and coordinate flows of financial information through competitive and cooperative mechanisms of disintermediation, extension of access, financialization, hybridization and personalization; (3) an analysis of related strategies for value creation connected with the competitive and cooperative mechanisms that were identified. Collectively, our results offer new insights into the diversity and range of emergent innovations and technologies which are transforming the financial services industry worldwide.