Abstract

The emergence of FinTech companies has drawn much speculation about their potential to disrupt incumbent financial institutions and take as much as 20% of their earnings by 2020. While time will tell about these predications, one emerging reality is that FinTech is creating a new ecosystem where the structure has incumbents, start-ups and tech firms forming alliances, partnerships, and investments. This paper investigates how Australian banks are assessing and developing initiatives within the FinTech ecosystem. We draw from the concepts of sensing and responding to analyse more than 3000 news articles, reports, and press releases covering the period 2008-2014 from four Australian Banks. Within the limitations of the method, our findings indicate that Australian Banks are actively embracing FinTech by creating mechanisms for inbound FinTech knowledge flows, monitoring and facilitating FinTech activities of start-ups, crowd-sourcing FinTech ideas, launching hubs to encourage internal FinTech innovations, modernizing their platforms with the adoption of technologies commonly associated with startups and investing in Fintech start-ups. These findings indicate banks’ continuous adaptive behaviour and open avenue for future research.

Download

Share

COinS