The FinTech Industry: Crowdfunding in Context

Abstract

This chapter presents how the financial services sector, especially banking, was a driver for ICT development in the last quarter of the twentieth century and early years of this century. But several phenomena happened on technological, social, and financial fronts in the second half of the last decade that led banks to ‘get their eyes off the ball’ and open the window for a whole new industrial sector to emerge, FinTech. This chapter analyses the phenomenon with the objective of answering: Why did FinTech emerge as an industrial sector, independent of banking? How is the FinTech industry organized and where does crowdfunding fit in? The chapter identifies three external forces that acted upon the banking system and created the conditions for the FinTech sector to emerge. It also looks at the FinTech sector from an industrial organization perspective and proposes a framework connecting financial services functionality and technological applications.