Purpose: In recent years, the penetration of digital technologies in the financial industry determined the arising of Fintech, which generated a dynamic and rapid change that business operators and supervisory authorities in the banking industry are struggling to follow it. This is especially due to issues affecting financial intermediaries and customers, and potential risks of stability of the financial system. The aim of this paper is to provide a review of Fintech in the banking industry thus to update the knowledge about technology innovation in the banking sector, identify the major trends in the domain and delineate future research directions.Design/methodology/approach: The study reviews 377 articles indexed on Scopus from 2014 to 2021 that focus on Fintech and the banking industry. The methodology adopted is structured in two steps: the keywords selection and the analysis of the documents extracted. The first step identified “Fintech” and “bank” as keywords to be searched within the title, abstract or keywords of documents indexed on Scopus; whereas the second step combined R and VOSviewer to provide a descriptive analysis of the dataset and the analysis of keywords and occurrences, respectively.Findings: Results achieved in the study allow providing a systemic view of the Fintech in the banking industry, including the emergent phenomenon of digital banking. In particular, it is provided with a general overview and descriptive information on the entire sample of documents analyzed, their authors, the keywords used and the most cited works. Besides, a deepening on the model of digital banking is provided, by delineating the six dimensions of the key effects generated by the digital bank model.Originality/value: Two main elements of originality characterize this study. The first one is related to the fact that few review studies have been published on Fintech in the banking industry, and the second one concerns the multiple dimensions of the impact of Fintech in the banking sector, which includes customer, company, bank, regulation authority and society.

Digitalization in many economic sectors drove the financial system to adapt to new paradigms of technological transformation. Moreover, the extant regulatory framework forced the financial system to reconsider its business models and its relationship with the market. Such reasons generated also in the banking sector a new model of competition within the ecosystem never seen before in this sector. The new ecosystem of banks and financial institutions lacks a common framework that not only synthesizes the development lines of open innovation in the banking sector but also regarding the planification of strategic choices and organization within the new ecosystems. The present study aims to inquire into the strategic positioning of European banks toward their digital transformation strategies, by analysing the decision-making processes that occurred between 2015 and 2022. A qualitative analysis of partnerships and the adoption of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) development in support of new service models was carried out. Results have relevant policy implications for regulators, linked to the business evolution and the risks of outsourcing, and managerial implications for the followers, specifically on the plan of service integration to diversify and boost their activities in the segment of customer relationship management and care, providing a better user experience.

This article empirically verifies the existence of a connection between the relationship-oriented model and the quality of the loan portfolio, by using alternative risk measures to previous studies. Consistently with earlier literature, bank size, distance and intensity of labour are used as proxies for the relationship lending model. The main results demonstrate that the relationship lending variables are all significant contributory factors to the loan portfolio quality. Robustness tests, conducted using intermediate risk measures (Doubtful Loan Rate (DLR), Past Due Loan Rate (PDLR)), confirm the results. Our findings are consistent with the relationship lending literature, but we extend to Default Rate (DR) measurement, a new role in terms of a banking model to create loans and manage credit risk. Finally, banking literature can take advantage of the DR indicator as a proxy for the quality of loan portfolio, and we consider its strong relationship to the intermediation model chosen.