Technological Forecasting & Social Change 155 (2020) 120022

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Technological Forecasting & Social Change

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/techfore

What have we learnt from 10 years of fintech research? a scientometric T

analysis
Jiajia Liu+, Xuerong Li, Shouyang Wang
⁎

Beijing University of Chemical Technology, China

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: With the development of financial market and various demands of customers, the traditional financial industry
Fintech begins to change the business process, risk controlling and business models. FinTech appears and develops
Business model rapidly in various business models to solve problems in the financial markets. This paper analyzes 629 FinTech
Bibliometric business model papers in the Web of Science database. First, we analyze the overall growth trend, research area,
Blockchain
research institutions and core authors in the Fintech business model based on the statistical analysis. Second, this
Crowdfunding
Mobile payment
paper builds the citation network of Fintech business model and analyzes citation clusters, the key nodes and
pivot nodes and the dynamic evolution of co-cited keywords. Finally, we summarize the latest hot topics in the
FinTech, which are mobile payment, microfinance, peer-to-peer lending platform and crowdfunding. In the
future, the trend of the research is Blockchain and crowdfunding and they will have a subversive influence on the
Fintech business model. The research ideas and conclusions in this paper are enlightening to the academic
research the commercial practical application of Fintech.

1. Introduction
In 2008, a severe financial crisis erupted in the US and subsequently
affected the rest of the world. In the last 15 years, commercial banks
have witnessed a downturn in their performance. Traditional financial
market needs FinTech to provide new profit, increase regulatory effi-
ciency and meet customers’ demands. Gradually, various kinds of in-
novative FinTech business models appear in financial market.
Researches on FinTech business model have drawn widespread atten-
tion among academics. Lee and Teo (2015) defined FinTech in five
principles: low profit margin, light asset, expandability, innovation and
easy compliance. The US Financial Stability Board (FSB, 2017) defined
FinTech as financial technological innovation resulting in new business
models, applications, processes or products. It had a considerable effect
on financial markets, institutions and services. Leong et al. (2017) did
case study on the business model of 007fendi. Gomber et al. (2017) did
a literature review about FinTech and analyzed future research direc-
tion. They thought the future Fintech are cross-country and cross-re-
gional peer-to-peer transfer systems, the smart-phone in financial
transactions and wearable facilities for financial transaction are the
future FinTech. Eickhoff et al. (2017) developed a taxonomy of FinTech
business models. Haddad and Lars (2018) thought Fintech occurred
more frequently in well-developed economies countries or more fragile
financial sectors. FinTech business model is the specific application of
FinTech in the economic and financial fields. For example, e-banking
integrates internet technology, APP and mobile payment. It enables
users to complete bank account transaction at home, which improves
the efficiency of bank transactions and saves customers’ time. From the
perspective of business model, we can have a more specific under-
standing of FinTech. We will be clearer about its application and its
significance of existence.
According to current studies, some researchers have offered defi-
nitions of FinTech business model based on their own academic back-
grounds. Most of papers have addressed sub-fields of FinTech and
presented conclusions based on researcher contributions, including
their subjective experience, related technology and development trends
in the sub-fields of FinTech (Moritz and Block, 2016; Yli-Huumo et al.,
2016; Yu et al., 2018a, 2018b). However, most of researches only in-
troduce the FinTech business model. They fail to analyze FinTech
business model from a comprehensive and systematic perspective. They
also cannot find out the influential institutes and researchers in dif-
ferent business models or key technology of FinTech. They also cannot

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: liujiajia@mail.buct.edu.cn (J. Liu).
+
Liu Jiajia is assistant profession in Beijing University of Chemical Technology, the College of Economics and Management. She received a PhD in Management
Science and Engineering from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2017. From 2017/07 to 2019/07, she worked as a postdoc in Academy of Mathematics
and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her research interests are to design simulation models for Fintech and real estate.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2020.120022
Received 20 November 2019; Received in revised form 18 February 2020; Accepted 11 March 2020
0040-1625/ © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
J. Liu, et al. Technological Forecasting & Social Change 155 (2020) 120022

figure out which kinds of business model of FinTech are the future
research hot points. Against these backdrops, this paper does a biblio-
metrics research to systematically analyze FinTech business model lit-
eratures. The main contributions in this paper are the following three
points. Firstly, bibliometrics research on FinTech business model can
achieve a firm, systematic and scientific understanding of the most
important research findings. The method can figure out the influential
institutes, researchers and their cooperation network. It can also fore-
cast the further research hotspots. Secondly, based on statistic and
network analysis, this paper figures out the most-active FinTech busi-
ness model research institutions are concentrated in the US and China.
The latest FinTech business model research hotspots are mobile pay-
ment, micro-finance, P2P lending and crowdfunding. Thirdly, it puts
forwards to Blockchain and crowdfunding as the future trend of Fin-
Tech studies. From academic aspect, this paper summarizes the current
research hotpots and points out further development direction of Fin-
Tech. From practical aspect, this paper is also a direction for enterprises
to help them find out promising technology and cooperative institutions
in Fintech. This paper can inspire future academic research on FinTech
and its application in the business world.
In this paper, Section 2 presents a basic statistical analysis of the
overall growth trend of FinTech business model and ascertains related
fields of study, the most active research institutions and the core au-
thors. Section 3 addresses the construction of the citation network, ci-
tation clustering, distinguishing key network nodes and the dynamic
evolution of this field. Section 4 concludes with a discussion of several
issues that represent research hotspots of FinTech business model.
2. Methodology
Bibliometrics is a powerful tool for the discovery and management
of information and it provides the useful analytical results in various
fields. In a narrow sense, bibliometrics refers to the quantitative ana-
lysis of academic publications and citations. It uses statistical means to
data mining the publication quantities, the number and frequency of
citations and collaborations involved in core-retrieved publications.
This approach can help scientific researchers distinguish core articles,
core journals, core academics and core institutions in specific fields,
evaluate the current state of the literature and predict development
trends. Bibliometrics has proven effective in obtaining useful results
across many fields. This paper follows the systematic mapping process
described by bibliometrics of Petersen et al. (2008) to analyze the
FinTech business model research. It establishes the overall trend of the
growth of FinTech business model publications, the involved fields of
study, the most active research institutions and the core authors. In
addition, it constructs co-citation clusters and analyzes the hotspots of
FinTech business model studies and their dynamic evolution. It con-
cludes that rapid growth has occurred in the magnitude of FinTech
business model research since 2008 as the diversity of research areas
has gradually expanded and that the current hotspots of FinTech
business model research are mobile payment, micro-finance, P2P
lending and crowdfunding.
This paper collects citation data compiled by the ISI Web of
ScienceTM Core Collection, which provides researchers, administrators,
faculty, and students with quick, powerful access to the world's leading
citation databases. Furthermore, this paper uses guidelines for a sys-
tematic literature review described by Budgen and Brereton (2006) to
search for relevant papers.
2.1. The definition of fintech business model
About the definition of FinTech business model, Akkizidis and
Stagars (2015) identified several different innovative business models
within FinTech. These models include online lending, crowdfunding
and crowdinvesting, transaction and payment terminals, personal fi-
nance management (PFM), digital currency and cryptocurrency, mobile
point of sale (mPOS), robo-advisors and e-banking. Lee and Shin (2018)
identified six FinTech business models, including payment business
model, wealth management business model, crowdfunding business
model, lending business model, capital market business model and in-
surance services business model. And they analyzed the challenges in
the FinTech sector. Based on the two definition, this paper analyzes
nine FinTech business models: online lending, crowdfunding, transac-
tion and payment terminals, personal finance management, digital
currency and cryptocurrency, mobile point of sale, robo-advisors, e-
banking, InsurTech. Table 1 presents their specific definitions and ex-
amples.
2.2. Keywords selection
Based on the definition of FinTech business model, the publications
retrieved for sampling in this paper are restricted to subjects containing
the words “financial technology”, “finance technology”, “FinTech”,
“Fin-tech” and “e-finance” in the core collection database of the Web of
Science. FinTech includes the P2P platform, crowdinvesting, mobile
payment, Blockchain and other business model. Thus this paper also
searches for subjects that include the words “P2P lending platform”,
“Peer to peer”, “Online lending”, “Crowdfunding”, “Crowdfund in-
vesting”, “Transaction terminals”, “Payment terminals”, “Cashless
payments”, “Paypal”, “Alipay”, “Personal finance management”,
“Blockchain”, “Smart contract”, “Digital currency”, “Bitcoin”,
“Cryptocurrency”, “Mobile payment”, “Mobile point of sale”, “Robo-

Table 1
Summary of Fintech business models.
Fintech business model Definition Example

Online lending/ online peer-to-peer lending/
P2P lending
Crowdfunding/ crowdinvesting
Transaction and payment terminals
Personal finance management
Digital currency/ cryptocurrency
Mobile point of sale
Robo-advisors
E-banking
InsurTech
Emerging online lending market outside of the established traditional financial system Prosper, Lending Club
Raising funds from backers in exchange for rewards, debt, convertible or equity Fundrise, StartEngine,
SeedInvest
Software on the mobile devices that allows consumers to store their credit and debit cards Paypal, Alipay
digitally to pay for things at retailers.
Helping users to management their financial accounts and allows users to consolidate their Wealthfront, Betterment
financial statements, net worth, banking relationships, and credit cards et al.
Alternative stores of value to established currencies. Many of them are encrypted Bitcoin, Ripple
The ability to process payments with credit cards or contactless with a smartphone and a
credit/debit card reader
Automated portfolio management and optimization according to a client mandate Wealthfront
Processing all client interactions and services through a software storefront
The use of technology innovations designed to create cost savings and efficiency in the field of Slice, Lemonade, Hippo
insurance

2
J. Liu, et al.
Fig. 1. The Process of Data Filtering.
advisors”, “Automated portfolio management”, “E-banking”, “online
bank”, “mobile bank” and “InsurTech”. From these keywords, 17,352
papers are retrieved.
2.3. Data filtering
Because all papers in the searchers are not necessarily related to the
research questions, these papers need to be assessed for their actual
relevance (Budgen and Brereton, 2006). After using the search protocol
in the scientific databases, the next stage is the screening of papers. For
screening the relevant papers, this paper uses a process proposed by
Dybå and Dingsøyr (2008). The whole process of data filtering is shown
in Fig. 1.
At the first screening phase, these papers are screened based on their
titles and excluded studies that are not relevant to the research topic.
For example, the search protocol returns papers related to FinTech in
other scientific fields, which have different meaning than the FinTech
from the perspective of business model. These papers are clearly out of
the scope of this paper. However, it is difficult to determine the re-
levancy of the paper based on the title of the paper. In the situations,
these papers are passed through to the next stage for further reading, In
the second phase, we read the abstracts of every paper that passed the
previous phase. In addition, we use specific inclusion and exclusion
criteria to screen each paper. This paper excludes the following types of
papers: (1) papers without full text, (2) papers that are not economic,
finance and management, (3) papers that have other meaning than
FinTech from the perspective of business model, (4) papers that are
duplicates. When a paper passes all four-exclusion criteria, and after
reading the abstract it is considered as focusing on FinTech business
model, we decide to include it in the next screening stage. The third
phase in a mapping study process after finding the relevant papers
through abstracts is keywords. For this phase, this paper uses the pro-
cess defined by Petersen et al. (2008) in Fig. 2. Keywords are done in
two steps. In the first step, we read the abstract and identify keywords
and concepts that reflect the contribution of the paper (Petersen et al.,
2008). The second step is to develop a higher level of understanding
based on these keywords. We use the keywords to cluster and form
Fig. 2. Building the Classification Scheme.
3
Technological Forecasting & Social Change 155 (2020) 120022
categories for the mapping of the studies. After clustering the cate-
gories, we read all the selected papers. After reading, we also update the
categories or create new ones, if the paper reveal something new. These
results in a systematic map of clustered categories formed from all the
relevant papers on the research topic. Last, from among the 17,352
retrieved papers, this paper selects 629 economics, finance and man-
agement papers closely associated with FinTech business model. The
period of the selected papers extends from 1995 to 2017.
3. Statistical analysis of fintech business model publications
Academic publications are generally viewed as important indicators
of the level of development of a discipline and scientific output. They
are also a measure of scientific accomplishment.
3.1. Analysis of the overall growth trend
Growth in the volume of scientific knowledge and the pattern of
such growth are closely associated with the growth of publications and
its pattern. Changes in the quantity of publications are a direct reflec-
tion of the changing conditions of the volume of scientific knowledge.
In this section, this paper analyzes the overall growth trend of FinTech
business model research through the numerical analysis of journal ar-
ticles.
Fig. 3 shows the statistics for the quantity of articles published in
each year and the total number of citations. It can be observed that a
surge in FinTech business model publications occurred after 2007,
which is consistent with the understanding among academics that the
FinTech business model research wave is associated with online tech-
nological development, the computer storage, computation ability of
big data and financial innovation. In 2016, the number of such pub-
lications attained a peak level of 206. From the seven publications in
2007 until today, publication quantity has increased 28-fold. This in-
crease indicates that FinTech business model is a topic of high interest
to the academic community.
Besides, Fig. 3 reflects the rapid increase in the number of citations
of FinTech business model-related publications. In 2007, there were
J. Liu, et al. Technological Forecasting & Social Change 155 (2020) 120022

Fig. 3. The Number and Growth Trend of Published Articles and Citations 1995–2017.

Fig. 4. The Classification of Research Directions and Their Proportion.

Table 2
The Description Statistic of High Cited Journals.
Num. Citation Frequency Number of Published Journal The Average Factor in the 5 years )“/” representatives
Articles monographs or meeting journal(

1 634 23 Electronic Commerce Research and Application 3.181

2 8 11 Lecture Notes in Computer Science /
3 218 9 Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 7.626
4 0 7 Fortune 0.143
5 35 6 Applied Economics 0.81
6 21 5 Economics Letters 0.796
7 3 5 Forbes 1.283
8 31 5 Information Systems and E Business Management 1.551
9 3 5 International Conference on Management of E Commerce /
and E Government Proceedings
10 27 5 Journal of Business Research 4.108

only 14 citations. This figure increased to 824 in 2016, followed by
1013 in 2017. The most cited article is “The dynamics of crowdfunding:
An exploratory study”. The article examined the motives behind the
success and failure of crowdfunding and suggested that personal net-
work, project quality and geographical location are associated with the
success of crowdfunding efforts. As of 2017, this article had been cited a
total of 85 times and can be viewed as establishing the foundation for
FinTech business model studies.
From 1995 to 2007, this paper notes insignificant changes in the
number of articles published and the citation quantities each year. From
2007 to 2015, there was exponential growth in the annul number of
articles published and the citation quantities. The two fitted R2 values
are 0.95 and 0.77, which indicates an exponential growth in FinTech
business model research and that FinTech business model is an emer-
ging research discipline that is gradually transitioning from the birth
phase to the growth phase. One reason for this phenomenon is that
since 2007, the rapid development of new technologies has enabled the
continuous integration of financial markets and technologies, which has
broadened the scope of such markets and increased the number of new
market growth areas. The legality of FinTech, returns for market in-
vestors thanks to FinTech and social efficiency have sparked interest
among academics. After 2016, the number of articles published an-
nually began to decline. However, the citation quantities of articles
continued to increase.
3.2. Analysis of study fields
In this section, by examining the distribution of the research fields
of the publication sample and the distribution of journals, this paper
can analyze the specific business models in which FinTech has been
addressed.
Fig. 4 explains the classification of research directions in the Fin-
Tech business model literature and their proportion in the entire pub-
lication sample. The research directions are provided by the Web of
Science database. Because the research directions of most publications
overlap, the aggregate of the proportions of all the research directions
exceeds 100%. The figure shows that the main research fields of Fin-
Tech business model publications are business economics, computer

4
J. Liu, et al. Technological Forecasting & Social Change 155 (2020) 120022

science and engineering. The research directions can be further nar-

Washington State University, University of Massachusetts

University of Pennsylvania and University of Minnesota

rowed to business and economics, information systems and e-com-

University of Michigan, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang

University System of Maryland, University of Houston

merce. This further narrowing is primarily possible because FinTech
augments and expands traditional financial markets, for example, by
reinventing business models and expanding information systems for

University of Arizona, Cornell University

financial markets. In addition, the development of FinTech strongly
Fudan University, Soochow University

affects the macro-economy and financial markets. These factors have

resulted in fruitful FinTech business model research in fields such as

National University of Singapore

Google, University of Michigan
economics, finance and computer science.
The analysis of highly cited FinTech business model publications
Cooperative Institutions

can enable us to ascertain the hotspot fields and directions of the re-
University of Toronto

New York University search and the quality of the scientific research results. This paper uses
the impact factor to evaluate journal impact. The impact factor is a
universal measure used to evaluate journals. It is calculated by dividing
University

the number of citations of articles published in a journal during the five

preceding years by the total number of articles published in that journal
during the five preceding years.
Papers Number

The impact factors of high cited journals are presented in Table 2.

These journals are included in the Science Citation Index (SCI). The
more influential FinTech business model studies are concentrated in the
business and economics fields of SCI journals, such as Electronic
12

7
7
7

6
6

5
5
5

Commerce Research and Applications, Entrepreneurship Theory and

Teamwork Competition in Microfinance, Behavior Model Clustering and Smart Contract in Blockchain

The Market Efficiency in FinTech The Social Network, Sex Difference and Information Acquisition in

Practice and Information Systems and E Business Management. The

The Social Network and geographical position in Lending-based Crowdfunding Smart Contract in

table indicates that FinTech business model research is yielding high-

Social Networks in Crowdfunding Market, The Sponsors’ Satisfaction, the Herd Effect and Credit

The Social Behavior in Lending-based Crowdfunding, The Payment Method in Mobile Payment

quality results that influence other business and economics research.

3.3. Analysis of high-level scientific research institutions

In this sub-section, we establish which scientific research institu-

tions have been most active in FinTech business model research and the
key research directions of such publications and the collaborations
Trust in Lending-based Crowdfunding Smart Contract in Blockchain

among researchers. Such evidence enables us to assess the progress of

FinTech business model research. Table 3 shows that among all pub-
lications in the sample, Southwestern University of Finance and Eco-
The Social Network and Product Pricing in Crowdfunding

nomics (SWUFE) published the most articles (12), followed by Aalto

Mobile Payment, the Social Adoption in Crowdfunding

University. Of the top 10 research institutions, five are located in the

The Social Network in Crowdfunding Blockchain

US, two in China and one each in Europe, Singapore and Canada.
China's SWUFE is ranked first. These results indicate that the most-ac-
tive FinTech business model research institutions are concentrated in
The Reasons of Failure in Crowdfunding

the US and China.

The third column in Table 3 presents the analysis results of key
directions for other research institutions that have collaborated with
Lending-based Crowdfunding
High-level Scientific Research Institutions and Their Collaborated Relationship.

the leading institutions in publishing FinTech business model articles.

SWUFE has a relatively wider range of research collaboration with
Fudan University and Soochow University, including the social network
of the crowdfunding market, the satisfaction levels of crowdfunding
Key Directions

sponsors, herd behavior and credit. Aalto University and Washington

Blockchain

State University have collaborated on mobile payment, while China's

Peking University and Arizona State University have collaborated on
Blockchain smart contracts. The scale and extent of collaboration be-
tween American and Chinese researchers on FinTech business model is
world-leading.
Southwestern University of Finance and

3.4. Analysis of core authors

National University of Singapore

University System of Maryland

“Core author” refers to a researcher with relatively higher output

University of Pennsylvania

and stronger influence in a given field. In bibliometrics, Price's law can

University of Toronto
New York University

be used to determine the core authors within a field. Price's law can be
Zhejiang University
Cornell University
Aalto University

expressed as follows (Li et al., 2017):

Institutions

Economics

M = 0.749 Nmax
MIT

where N denotes the maximum number of articles published by one

author among all authors. M refers to the minimum number of articles
Table 3

Num.

published by core authors. That is, authors who publish more than M
10
1

2
3
4

5
6

8
9

number of articles are core authors.

5
J. Liu, et al. Technological Forecasting & Social Change 155 (2020) 120022

Table 4
The Description Statistic of Core Authors.
Num. Authors The Number of Joint Authors The Number of Published Articles The Proportion of the Total Number

1 Freedman D.M., Mullan P.C., Nutting M.R. 3 8 3.82%

2 Liebana-Cabanillas F., Chen D.Y., Sidman C., Zheng H.C. 4 7 4.45%
3 Akkizidis I., Chen Y., Lin Z. X., Martínez F. M. et al. 10 5 7.95%
4 Androulaki E., Bouri E., De Luna IR., Franco P., Karame G. et al. 11 4 6.70%
5 Bouoiyour J., Akutsu A., Chen X.H., Dholakia U. M. et al. 25 3 11.92%
The Total Number 53 34.84%

Fig. 5. The Citation Network and Clustering of the FinTech Business Model.

Table 5
Clusters analysis on Co-cited Articles.
Cluster ID Cluster Label Research Priorities Numbers of Articles in Cluster

1 Peer-to-peer lending Peer-to-peer lending platforms 221

2 Microfinance Micro credit 32
3 Crowdfunding Equity-based and lending-based crowdfunding 137
4 Mobile Payment Mobile payment 106

In the publication sample searched for this paper, the maximum
number of articles published by a single author is eight. Thus, Nmax = 8.
According to Price's law, M = 3. Therefore, authors with more than
three published articles represent core authors in the FinTech business
model field. Based on the sequence of article quantities, the top 53
authors are core authors in the field of FinTech business model
(Table 4).
As shown in Table 4, the number of published articles of 53 core
authors accounted for 34.84% of the total articles. Among these au-
thors, Freedman, Mullan and Nutting published eight papers, primarily
on the development path of the crowdinvesting market (Freedman and
Nutting, 2015a), investor risks and revenue management and invest-
ment terms (Freedman and Nutting, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2015d).
Liebana-Cabanillas, Chen, Sidman and Zheng published seven papers.
Liébana-Cabanillas et al. (2014a, 2014b) and Liébana-Cabanillas et al.,
(2014c, 2015) mainly studied the adoption of a new mobile payment
system and the effect of users’ behavior including age and gender on the
adoption. Ten authors including Akkizidis, Chen, Lin, Martínez pub-
lished 5 papers.
Androulaki and other 10 authors published three papers.
Androulaki et al. (2013) evaluated the user privacy in Bitcoin. The
results showed that almost 40% of the users could recover when users
adopted privacy measures recommended by Bitcoin. Bouri et al.
(2017a, 2017b) examined whether Bitcoin could hedge global un-
certainty or act as a hedge and safe in the financial market. The results
showed that Bitcoin could only serve as a strong safe haven against
weekly extreme down movements in Asian stocks. Bouoiyour and other
24 authors published four papers and they tended to study Chinese
Bitcoin market. Bouoiyour and Selmi (2015) identified the main de-
terminants of Bitcoin price in China. They also thought that Bitcoin was
not the hedge haven. Bouoiyour et al. (2015) explored the Granger
causality for two relationships between Bitcoin price and trade trans-
actions or investors' attractiveness, when Bitcoin price are under dif-
ferent frequencies in China. The results showed that there was a lead-

6
J. Liu, et al.
Fig. 6. Landmarks and Turning Points of Co-cited Articles.
lag relationship between exchange-trade ratio and Bitcoin price. Be-
sides, the lead-lag relationship exited between investors’ attractiveness
and Bitcoin price.
Generally, FinTech business model research are concentrated
among a relatively small cluster of academics of whom most have
published a small number of papers. In the emerging field of FinTech,
the cluster of core authors remains in the formative stage. However,
with more academics showing interest in FinTech business model, the
number of authors who qualify for this cluster and their scope of study
will broaden. These authors will lead the research on FinTech business
model and push such research to a higher level.
4. Co-Citation analysis
Descriptive statistical analysis identifies influential authors and in-
stitutions in the field of FinTech business model, while co-citation
analysis focus on the contribution of specific articles. In this section, the
co-citation network of FinTech business model literatures is constructed
using Citespace. Based on the cluster analysis, the important nodes and
the evolution of the network are identified, as well as the hot topics
during the development of FinTech business model research. In order to
eliminate unnecessary clusters and improve the performance of the
visualization, we use 629 articles after filtering.
4.1. Clusters analysis on co-cited articles
Clustering analysis of co-citation network is a specific application of
clustering technology in the field of co-citation analysis. It classifies a
given collection of literatures into several clusters based on the mea-
surement of co-cited frequency. The articles in the same cluster are
closely related by the content, and the connections between the clusters
are given by the quantitative indicators of network. At last, a visuali-
zation of clustering network is generated based on the articles of a re-
search field. Citespace first clusters the literatures in different time di-
visions, and then merges the sub-clusters into a unified visual view.
The visualization of clusters of co-cited articles is shown in Fig. 5.
The size of the nodes corresponds to the citation frequency of the ar-
ticles, and the link between two nodes represents the co-cited re-
lationship between the two articles. Table 5 presents the basic
7
Technological Forecasting & Social Change 155 (2020) 120022
information of clusters in the co-citation network of Fig. 5. The labels of
clusters are extracted from the abstracts of cluster members by the
method of Mutual Information (MI). The research priorities in Table 5
are summarized based on the high-frequency keywords and highly cited
articles in the cluster. Results of the clustering analysis indicate that,
there are 4 clusters in the co-citation network of Fintech literatures,
which correspond to research topics in different time periods.
Cluster #1 and #3 are the prominent clusters in Fig. 5, which in-
clude more cluster members than other two clusters. Cluster #1 (“peer-
to-peer lending”) has 221 members, while Cluster #3 (“crowdfunding”)
has 137 members. The research priorities of the two clusters are peer to
peer lending platform and crowdfunding. Cluster #2 and #4 has less
members of 139, which put more emphasis on microfinance and mobile
payment. By analyzing the cited time of sample articles in clusters, it
suggests that the co-cited time periods of Cluster #1–4 are 2011, 2008,
2013 and 2007, which indicate research priorities of FinTech business
model research in different time periods.
The researches on online lending include successful factors of P2P
(Li et al., 2013), impacted factors of interest rate (Pope and
Sydnor, 2011), credit default (Liao et al., 2015), risk assessment
(Malekipirbazari and Aksakalli, 2015), herding effect (Luo and
Lin, 2013) and trust in the platform (Chen et al., 2014).
The studies on microfinance are the introduction of microfinance
(Cull et al., 2009), microfinance's social effect and sustainability
(Hartarska and Nadolnyak, 2007; Hermes and Lensink, 2011; Banerjee
et al., 2015), efficiency or performance of microfinance's institutes
(Gutierrez-Nieto et al., 2007; Copestake, 2007; Ahlin et al., 2011;
Hermes et al., 2011) and the impact of business training on micro-
finance clients and institutions (Karlan and Valdivia, 2011).
The studies on crowdfunding include investigating the dynamics of
success and failure among crowdfunded ventures (Mollick, 2014), the
determinants of funding success (Ahlers et al., 2015; Vulkan et al.,
2016), investors prefer financing methods (Belleflamme et al., 2014)
and the regulation of equity crowdfunding (Hornuf and
Schwienbacher, 2017).
About the study on mobile payment, Kim et al. (2009) studied the
factors that influence the formation of trust in mobile banking which in
turn affects the intention to use the service. De Reuver et al. (2015)
analyzed the collaboration and competition between banks and
J. Liu, et al. Technological Forecasting & Social Change 155 (2020) 120022

operators. Their paper studied three major Dutch banks and three
Cluster ID
Dutch telecom operators who jointly developed a trusted service
manager for mobile payment. They found that differing strategic ob-

1&2

1&3
1&4
3
3
1
jectives and interests, conflicts, lack of dependencies and governance
issues led to dissolution of the mobile payment platform.
Citation Frequency

4.2. Landmarks and turning points of co-cited articles

Landmark nodes and turning points are noteworthy nodes in co-

904
232

156
150
142
135
85
61
47

25

89
6

3 citation network, which demonstrate the evolution path and important

studies in a research field. Landmark nodes have large size and high
2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative

cited frequency. They play a basic and fundamental role during the
development of a research field. Turning points (pivot nodes) are the

Electronic Commerce Research and Applications

only connecting nodes between two clusters, which suggests that they

Electronic Commerce Research and Application

lead to the changing of research priorities. In the visualization of co-
citation network in Citespace, landmark nodes and pivot points are
Journal of Strategic Information Systems

Journal of Financial Intermediation highlighted with a purple ring so that they stand out in a visualized
network.
Journal of Marketing Research
Information Systems Research
Journal of Business Venturing
Journal of Business Venturing

Journal of Business Venturing

Journal of Business Venturing

In Fig. 6, double arrows point to landmark nodes, while single ar-

rows points to turning points in co-citation network. Table 5 presents
landmark nodes, turning points and highly cited articles. Belleflamme
Management Science

et al. (2014), Mollick (2014) and Lin et al. (2013) are landmark nodes
in co-citation network. Belleflamme et al. (2014) found that crowd-
funding platforms could tackle information asymmetry by bringing
individual reputation into community reputation, and act as trusted
Journal

Work

intermediaries. Mollick (2014) offered a description of the underlying

dynamics of success and failure among crowdfunded ventures. He also
shed light more generally on the ways that the actions of founders may
Judging borrowers by the company they keep: Friendship networks and information asymmetry in online

Tell me a good story and I may lend you money: the role of narratives in peer-to-peer lending decisions

affect their ability to receive entrepreneurial financing. Lin et al. (2013)

found that the online friendships of borrowers’ act as signals of credit
quality. Friendships increased the probability of successful funding,
lower interest rates on funded loans, and are associated with lower ex
post default rates. In less than five years since these three articles
Understanding consumer acceptance of mobile payment services: An empirical analysis

published, they have been cited by large amount of literatures, which

Sending mixed signals:multilevel reputation effects in peer-to-peer lending markets

makes them landmarks during the development of FinTech business

model research. Meanwhile, they demonstrate that signal transmission,
information asymmetry, enterprise financing and social network are
Past, present and future of mobile payments research: A literature review
Exploring consumer adoption of mobile payments - A qualitative study

common concerns of the research topics in the field of FinTech business

model Table 6.
Building effective online marketplaces with institution-based trust

Table 6 represents landmarks, turning and high quotation points of

co-cited articles. The three turning points of FinTech business model are
Collier and Hampshire (2010), Pavlou and Gefen (2004) and
Diversity of opinion and financing of new technologies
The dynamics of crowdfunding: An exploratory study

The dynamics of crowdfunding: An exploratory study

Herzenstein, 2011. Collier and Hampshire (2010) is the turning point of

Cluster #1 and #2. They found that incentives became aligned for peers
to select highly qualified borrowers and produced costlier information
signals to reduce the adverse selection and moral hazard risk typical of
Landmarks, Turning and High Quotation Points of Co-cited Articles.

Crowdfunding: Tapping the right crowd

Crowdfunding: Tapping the right crowd

any principle-agent relationship. Pavlou and Gefen (2004) is the

turning point of Cluster #1 and #3. Herzenstein (2011) is the turning
point of Cluster #1 and #4. Their empirical study provided evidence of
strategic herding behavior by lenders such that they had a greater
likelihood of bidding on an auction with more bids Fig. 7.
peer-to-peer lending
Book/Article Title

4.3. Clustering analysis on co-cited authors

Total Number

Among co-cited authors, Mollick, Belleflamme, Lin., Burtch and

Herzenstein have highest cited frequencies. Table 7 represents their
institutions and main research areas. Their articles play an important
revelatory role in FinTech business model research. The cited fre-
Collier and Hampshire (2010)

quencies of articles of Mollick, Belleflamme, Lin, Burtch and Herzen-

Belleflamme et al. (2014)

Belleflamme et al. (2014)

Pavlou and Gefen (2004)

stein are 85, 58, 47, 35 and 25, respectively. A typical article of
Allen and Gale (1999)
Dahlberg et al. (2008)
Highly cited articles

Schierz et al. (2010)

Mollick (2014) talked about the success and failure of crowdfunding

Herzenstein (2011)
Landmark points

Lin et al. (2013)

ventures. The results indicated that personal networks and project

Turning points
Mollick (2014)

Mollick (2014)
Mallat (2007)

quality are associated with the success of crowdfunding efforts, and that
Author(s)

geography is related to both the type of projects proposed and suc-

Table 6

cessful fundraising. A typical article of Belleflamme was the paper that

he cooperated with Lambert and Schwienbacher in 2014. The paper

8
J. Liu, et al.
Fig. 7. Clustering Analysis on Co-cited Authors.
Table 7
Top Five Co-cited Authors’ Institutions and Main Research Area.
Author(s) Institutions
Mollick E. University of Pennsylvania
Belleflamme P. Universit´e catholique de Louvain
Lin MF. University of Arizona
Burtch G. University of Minnesota
Herzenstein M. University of Delaware
compared two types of crowdfunding: pre-order the product or share of
future profits. The results showed that the entrepreneur prefers pre-
ordering if the initial capital requirement is relatively small compared
with market size and prefers profit sharing otherwise. A typical article
of Lin et al. (2013) used a large sample of failed listings from the largest
online P2P lending marketplace, Prosper.com. The result found that the
online friendships of borrowers increased the probability of successful
funding, lower interest rates on funded loans, and were associated with
lower ex post default rates, because friendships are signals of credit
quality.
4.4. Dynamic evolution of co-cited keywords
In order to explore the dynamic evolution of FinTech business
model research, this paper divides the sample period into four sub-
samples to perform cluster analysis. Fig. 8 presents results of clusters
during the sub-samples of 2007–2010, 2010–2013, 2013–2016 and
2016–2017. Results suggest that most of clusters only exist for a short
period of time, which indicate that research priorities keep changing
over the last ten years. During the development of FinTech business
model research, the noteworthy research topics include mobile pay-
ment, crowdfunding and Blockchain et al.
The left-sided nodes are published about 9 years ago, and the right-
sided ones are published in recent two years. Some pivot nodes of
keywords are listed in Fig. 8. In this figure, we expect to depict the
evolution of topics in FinTech business model study. In 2007–2010,
researchers focus on FinTech specific business models and mobile
9
Technological Forecasting & Social Change 155 (2020) 120022
Main Research Areas
Crowdfunding, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Games
Innovation in the digital economy
Information Technology Management
Crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing, Social media
Marketing
payment. Research topics changed to lending-based crowdfunding by
2010–2013. In 2013–2016, researchers put more emphasis on Block-
chain and Bitcoin. After 2016, hot topics of FinTech business model
research have changed to Bitcoin, crowdfunding and Blockchain. The
previous parts in the paper have analyzed researches on FinTech
business models, mobile payment, lending-based crowdfunding, bitcoin
and crowdfunding. Thus this part only gives a detailed description on
Blockchain. The study about Blockchain includes the application of
Blockchain technology in modern banking industry or Internet of
Things or smart cities (Peters, and Panayi, 2016; Fanning and
Centers, 2016; Zhang and Wen, 2017) and the limitations, risks and
opportunities of Blockchain (Lemieux, 2016). A typical research of
Blockchain is Swan M. published book in 2015. The book mainly in-
troduced the definition, development and limitations of Blockchain
(Swan, 2015). Table 8 summaries the evolution trend of research hot-
spots, including publishing year, research topics and corresponding
articles.
5. Conclusion and further research
FinTech business model has emerged as a research hotspot in recent
years. Although a number of researchers have studied on the topic
based on several sub-fields, there has been no research on the overall
FinTech business model knowledge system. In particular, a quantitative
analysis of the publication characteristics of a massive sample of
FinTech business model publications and their citation frequencies has
been lacking. Bibliometric research on FinTech business model enables
J. Liu, et al.
Fig. 8. Dynamic Evolution of Co-cited Keywords.
Table 8
The Evolution Trend of Research Hotspots.
Years Topics
2007–2010 Mobile Payment
2010–2013 Lending-based Crowdfunding
2013–2016 Blockchain Bitcoin
2016–2017 Bitcoin, Crowdfunding Blockchain
us to obtain a firm understanding of the key research findings in the
field using a scientific approach. The results of such research can inspire
future research on FinTech and its application in the business world.
In this paper, we applied bibliometrics to analyze FinTech business
model-related research developments. Specifically, we described the
overall trend of growth for FinTech business model publications, the
areas of FinTech research, the most active research institutions and the
core authors. In addition, we constructed co-citation clusters and ana-
lyzed hotspots of FinTech business model studies and their dynamic
evolution.
Based on our bibliometric analysis, we offer the following key
conclusions:
1) FinTech business model is a field of study that has emerged in recent
years. In 2007, there were only 14 citations. In 2017, this figure
increased to 1013. The research excitement regarding FinTech
business model in recent years is mainly due to the developments of
Web communications technology, the computer storage and com-
putation ability of big data. As we advance into the 21st century,
new working formats for business processes, risk controls and
business models have emerged in the traditional financial industry.
To a large extent, traditional theories no longer apply. FinTech
business model research has emerged in response to the pressing
needs of the industry and the academic world and is now fast-
growing.
2) Based on our empirical findings regarding citation networks, the
latest FinTech business model research hotspots are mobile pay-
ment, micro-finance, P2P lending and crowdfunding. Since 2010,
10
Technological Forecasting & Social Change 155 (2020) 120022
Corresponding articles
Kim et al. (2009). Dahlberg et al. (2008).
Herzenstein (2011). Lin et al. (2013).
Fanning and Centers (2016).
Hornuf and Schwienbacher (2017). McConaghy et al. (2017). Zhang and Wen (2017).
the popularity of smart phones and the improvement of mobile
payment technology have provided the objective conditions for
mobile payment, microfinance, P2P lending and crowdfunding are
based on individual credit information and precise risk control.
However, these factors cannot be effectively ascertained without the
capture, storage and analysis of massive customer data. As techno-
logical facilities maturing, these emerging business models in the
field of FinTech will gain additional attention.
3) This paper proposes Blockchain and crowdfunding research as the
future trend of FinTech studies. To be specific, increasing number of
researches focus on Blockchain-based application beyond Bitcoin,
for example, smart cities, cryptocurrency systems (Yli-Huumo et al.,
2016; McConaghy et al., 2017; Lluïsa and Llacuna, 2018; Palmié
et al., 2020). These studies indicate that Blockchain technology may
have a disruptive impact on the financial industry. Besides, few
researches can be found to analyze the influence of crowdfunding on
the banking system, and existing research has not addressed the
competition among crowdfunding platforms. Therefore, interesting
research questions in this context can be identified: Are crowd-
funding platforms competitors or complements to banks instead of
substitutes? How do crowdfunding platforms compete? (Gomber
et al., 2017; Chen et al., 2019).
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Jiajia Liu: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Data cura-
tion, Investigation, Visualization. Xuerong Li: Writing - original draft,
Validation, Writing - review & editing. Shouyang Wang: Supervision.
J. Liu, et al.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by grants from the National Natural
Science Foundation of China (Nos. 71722007 & 71931001), and the
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (XK1802-5 &
buctrc201926).
Supplementary materials
Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in
the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2020.120022.
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