What is the impact of Fintech on the banking system?

Abstract

Since the outbreak of the banking crisis in 2008, the irruption of Fintech companies as potential competitors of traditional banking is signifying a revolution within the financial sector. For this reason, analysing their impact on the economy is one of the trends in this recent field of research. However, due to the lack of access to data from these companies, most of the articles are theoretical. In this sense, the main contribution of this work is to provide an empirical analysis which measures the impact generated by the Fintech sector in Europe, thanks to an extensive database extracted manually, comprising more than 2000 companies and funding rounds from 38 countries. To this end, a descriptive analysis of the European sector has been carried out, where the United Kingdom is clearly positioned as the leader, especially from 2015 onwards. Finally, an econometric analysis has also performed, including the top six countries with the highest number of fintechs, showing that the Fintech sector has a positive impact on the efficiency and competition of the banking system while increasing the instability of it.