Study regarding Romanian students' perception and behaviour concerning the fintech area with a focus on cryptocurrencies and online payments

Abstract

Fintech, which is a shorthand expression for financial technology, is basically referring to all the technological innovations in the financial sector that started to develop exponentially, especially in the second decade of the 21st century, in the era of the mobile internet revolution. The Generation Z, also called Gen Tech, who was growing up using the internet and especially the mobile internet on a daily basis, will probably be the larger adopter and beneficiary of these innovative financial technologies. The current generation of students, born about twenty years ago, is part of this cohort and this is why we decided to initiate a study regarding their perception and behavior concerning the fintech area with the help of a questionnaire applied on some of the students of the Faculty of European Studies from Babeş-Bolyai University. Because the fintech is covering financial innovations from a very broad area (including cryptocurrency, online payments, financial transfers, openbanking, investments, regtech, insurtech, etc.) we decided to focus in this preliminary study, only on the blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies and in relation to these, on the online payments.