Definition _______________________________________________________ 16

Due to 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the global economy had kept downturn ever

since. Customers had gradually lost faith in financial institutions, such as banks.

Traditional financial institutions’ development and services changed so slowly that they couldn’t meet the changing needs of customers. What’s more, the inefficiency, poor services, and the imperfection of personal privacy protection of the traditional financial institutions all caused the startups or other technological companies to have a chance to come up with a new model of financial services and technology to stand out from the market, and all the reasons above have become the nutrition for Fintech‘s seed to start to sprout.

The term Fintech had already be used in the research of Bettinger in 1972, the vice president of Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and he provided the following definition

“Fintech is an acronym which stands for financial technology, combing bank expertise with modern management science techniques and the computer” (Prabook, 2016).

Another early adoption can be dated back to the early 1990s, a project named ‘Financial Services Technology Consortium’, initiated by Citigroup to facilitate technological cooperation (Arner et al., 2015). However, the definition of Fintech wasn’t until the recent years that it became clearer in academic researches.

Since 2013, there comes a lot clearer and more detailed definitions of Fintech, which are summarized in Table 1 below. Some definitions are broader, such as Fintech being a different way to conduct financial activities (Xie & Zou, 2013), or making

financial systems and financial services more efficient by means of technology (Wharton Fintech, 2014; Krabec, & Venegas, 2016). Other definitions focus on Fintech’s significant impact on the business, financial markets, and daily lives, like disrupting traditional business models in business and bringing about new risk on the market (Loncarski, 2016), facilitating payments for goods and services through daily lives, and providing the important infrastructure to the operation of the world’s financial institutions (Langley, 2014). Still others mentioned the sectors that Fintech contains, including payments, financial data and analysis, financial software, digitized process, and wider public payment platforms (Barberis, 2014).

From the definition of Fintech, there covers a lot of different field of financial services, like payment, financial data analysis, public platform, …etc. Many relevant literatures have been proposed and extensively discussed. Some literatures discussed about crowdfunding (Groshoff, David and Urien, Kurtis, and Nguyen, Alex, 2014), another literatures talked about new technology like blockchain (Walch, 2015), and still other literatures researches about Fintech platforms (Dhar & Stein, 2016), …etc.

Table 1: The Summary of the Definition of Fintech by Scholars

Scholars Definition

Bettinger (1972)

“Fintech is an acronym, which stands for financial technology, combing bank expertise with modern management science techniques and the computer.”

Xie & Zou (2013)

“Beside indirect financing via commercial banks and direct financing through security markets, a third way to conduct financial activities will emerge, which we call

‘internet finance’.”

Barberis (2014)

“Fintech refers to the application of technology within the financial industry. The sector covers a wide range of activities from payments (e.g. Contactless) to financial data and analysis (e.g. Credit scoring), financial software (e.g. risk management), digitized processes (e.g.

authentication) and, perhaps most well-known to the wider public, payment platforms (e.g. P2P lending).”

Wharton Fintech (2014)

“Fin Tech noun: an economic industry composed of companies that use technology to make financial systems more efficient.”

Langley (2014)

“Technology applied to financial services (Fintech) has a significant impact on our daily lives, from facilitating payments for goods and services to providing the infrastructure essential to the operation of the world’s financial institutions. ”

Micu & Micu (2016)

“Financial Technology, also known as FinTech, is a new sector in the finance industry that incorporates the whole plethora of technology that is used in finance to facilitate trades, corporate business or interaction and services provided to the retail consumer.”

Shim & Shin (2016)

“Fintech is an emerging financial services sector that includes third-party payment, MMF, insurance, products, risk management, authentication, and peer-to-peer (P2P) lending.”

Maier (2016)

“Driven by technological advances, new service models have developed in the financial industry which offer additional opportunities to customers. Under the common denominator ‘fintech’, these new businesses aim to

challenge existing financial institutions by using technology to deliver value to the customer in an alternative way.”

Krabec, &

Venegas (2016)

“Fintech is an economic industry composed of companies that use technology to make financial services more efficient.”

Loncarski (2016)

“In addition to this, a particular evolution and use of technology (commonly referred these days as fintech) in finance is disrupting traditional business models in financial markets, as well as bringing about new and uncharted risk territories.”

Xie, Zou, & Lou (2016)

“Internet Finance is a spectral concept. It covers all forms of financial transactions and financial intermediaries and markets, such as commercial banks, securities firms, insurance companies, and stock exchanges, to the scenario under Walrasian equilibrium (where neither financial intermediaries nor markets exist) caused by the impacts of internet technologies.” And “We think internet finance and Fintech are essentially different terms for the same concept.”

Jun & Yeo (2016)

“Recent advances in information and communications technology (ICT) have led to the rapid development and expansion of new and innovative financial services, often termed Fintech.”

‘technology’, and collectively refers to industrial changes forged from the convergence of financial services and IT. ”

Source：Schueffel, Patrick (2016)

2.1.2 Fintech Trend Analysis

Based on the rapid change and disruption of innovative Fintech, there gradually have many literatures that research about the trend of Fintech. From the recent research literatures of Fintech, there have some papers that research about the trend of stock price, products’ trend, mobile payment, security, mobile devices, and digital trends in the asset management industry.

In 2016, there proposed a new method to forecast stock price trend by social network, text mining and machines learning analysis, which shows while using different financial resources to investment will have different effects, the accuracy of forecasting still can be improved by deep learning method (Day & Lee, 2016).

In addition to forecasting investment factors, there also has a paper forecasting the vacant mobile payment technology of Fintech by patent analysis to find out the key technology trend of mobile payment (Kim & Shim, 2016), and has another paper proposing a new method to identify the future trends of products by means of social media analysis, and big data analysis to analyze the social media communication of startups to capture the latest development or potential opportunities of products (Hauke

& Leker, 2016).

In the early 2017, there have some papers uses text mining techniques to analyze the trends of Fintech’s development in home country (Li & Dai & Park & Em. et al.,

2017), or trends of mobile devices’ security (Seo, JH. & Park, EM., 2017), or even uses network analysis to analyze the asset management and financial robo advisory services (Boldrini & Giorgino, 2017).

This study has summarized the above research into Table 2 below. In summary, many researches of Fintech trend analysis mostly focus on the specific technology or financial services in Fintech to analyze the trend pattern, while there has a few papers that concentrate on the overall development of all the sectors of Fintech and its potential trends. Hence, this paper takes all the sectors of Fintech as the research topic, and explores the relationship between the vocabularies in the patent data in a systematic and comprehensive review, and mines the potential trend in Fintech.

Table 2: The Summary of Recent Researches about Fintech Trend Analysis

Year Author Content

2016 Day & Lee

Forecasting the trend of stock price by social network analysis, text mining and machine learning analysis, and finds out machine learning method can help improve the accuracy of forecasting stock price.

2016 Kim & Shim

Forecasting the vacant technology of mobile payment by patent analysis to find out the key technology trend of mobile payment.

2016 Hauke & Leker

Proposing a research method to identify the future trends of products by social media and big data analysis to analyze the social media

latest development or potential opportunities of products.

2017 Li & Dai & Park

& EM. et al.

Using text-mining techniques to analyze the trends of the development of Fintech in the home country.

2017 Seo, JH. & Park, EM.

Using text-mining techniques to analyze the trends of mobile devices’ security.

2017 Boldrini &

Giorgino

Using network analysis to analyze the asset management and financial advisory services through robo technology.

Source：Summarized by this study

2.2 Patent Analysis for Trends

Intellectual property rights, especially patents, are the vital rights protection derived from research and development. In other terms, patent rights are the most useful tools to protect your innovative technologies. Besides, through patent analysis, the corporate can understand the development and the trend of this technology.