Introduction to the special issue on Crowdfunding and FinTech
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EDITORIAL
Financial Innovation
Open Access
Introduction to the special issue on Crowdfunding and FinTech Yue Ma1* and De Liu2 * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Over the past 10 years, crowdfunding, which allows a large number of individuals to collectively finance a new business venture through a technology platform, has risen rapidly as a popular way of financing a wide range of activities including business ventures, personal loans, and charity projects. The modern crowdfunding business mode consists of three types of players: the project proposers who provide the original idea/blueprint/project that requires external finance, potential investors who are interested in the idea, and an internet platform that brings all parties alongside to kick-start the new business venture. According to crowdexpert.com, the global crowdfunding industry raised an estimate total of $34 billion in 2015.1 Amidst the take-off of crowdfunding around 2010 (Fig. 1),2 technology-based innovations also emerged in other sectors of the financial industry. Around 2014, the term “FinTech”, an abbreviation of “Financial Technology”, started being used broadly to refer to the influx of technology tools, platforms, and ecosystems that make financial services or products more accessible, efficient, and affordable. The crowdfunding activity is just one of many aspects of FinTech. Though the use of the term “FinTech” is fairly recent (Fig. 1), it is clear that the financial industry has experienced influx of other financial technologies in the history, such as the introduction of Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) in 1967. FinTech today refers to not one, but a host of technologies that broadly impact the way financial payment, funding, lending, investing, financial services, and currencies are conducted. These include, for instance, digital payments, crowdfunding, Robo-advisors, cryptocurrencies and markets/services enabled by cryptocurrencies. Because the revolution brought by FinTech is so new and still ongoing, it is not surprising to find that the ‘top’ academic journals have yet caught up with the latest developments in FinTech. Top Finance and Accounting journals, in particular, have published very limited number of papers on FinTech. A review paper on Internet big data and capital markets by Minjian Ye and Guangzhong Li in this special issue finds that only four papers from the top-3 finance journals - three from Journal of Finance, one from Review of Financial Studies, and none from Journal of Financial Economics – focus on the issues of big data in capital markets. Similarly, only three papers from the top-3 accounting journals do the same. Although the editors of the top tier finance and accounting journals are realizing the increasing importance of FinTech for academic research and are catching up, many interesting and pressing FinTech issues that require academic treatises have not received much attention i
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