Journal of Financial Management, Markets and Institutions

We test whether the relationship between finance and growth is present in 48 countries over 20 different periods of an equal length of 15 years, starting in 1980 (to 1995) and ending in 1999 (to 2014). We estimate growth regressions using an IV approach and we find that (1) overall financial development had a positive effect on economic growth for almost all our studied periods, (2) the legal system is the primary determinant of the effectiveness of the overall financial system, and (3) financial services were relevant for economic growth even during the financial crisis of 2008. This research is part of a research agenda revisiting the finance–growth nexus using up-to-date empirical methodologies.

This article explores some recent macroeconomic and microeconomic approaches to financial digitalization and the relationship between banks, FinTech and BigTech. It also deals with new approaches to identify the adoption and implications of financial digitalization by consumers. We show competition between traditional banks and tech companies is mostly driven by their relative ability to manage information sharing. Regulation is still considering ways of providing a level playing field while industry participants are reacting with a mixture of strategies, many of them based on cooperation. The paper also shows there are different ways in which customers access financial digital channels and new approaches from matching learning and brain studies to identify behavioral patterns in financial digitalization decisions.

In this article, we review some recent developments in the field of Financial Technology or “FinTech.” We begin with an overview of what FinTech is and why it has become an important growth industry in the financial services area and therefore an important research topic in finance. In the next section, we review some of the academic literature in the FinTech area. In the subsequent section, we characterize the financing of FinTech startups, especially by venture capital firms. In the following section, we characterize innovation by FinTech firms as well as by incumbent financial intermediaries. In the next section, we move on to discuss potential sources of value creation by FinTech start-up firms relative to existing incumbent firms: we conjecture that one source of value creation may arise from FinTech startups being able to provide a superior customer experience relative to incumbent firms in various areas of consumer finance. In the following section, we discuss the regulatory environment facing FinTech firms, in their banking as well as in their financial market activities. In the penultimate section, we analyze the buy-versus-build decision facing firms choosing to enter the FinTech sector and discuss the trade-offs that may drive such decisions in practice. We conclude with some remarks about the future directions that may be taken by the FinTech industry.

This paper offers an overview of research on SME access to finance during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in order to cull key things that we have learned. It discusses selected articles that peg the frontier of knowledge on this topic in both European and American contexts. It highlights differences between these two areas in terms of how the crisis unfolded. It also identifies key differences in the availability of data between Europe and the US that shape the nature of the empirical analysis of the attendant credit crunch. Selected research on both the nature and magnitude of the impact of the credit crunch on the SME sector are discussed. Research on some key policy initiatives to mitigate the crisis’ damage in Europe and in the US are also discussed. The paper concludes with some comments on how research on the GFC might inform research on SME access to finance during the unfolding COVID-19 crisis.