Challenges Facing the Development of Fintech Business Models: A Systematic Literature Review

Most of the foreign and domestic academic investigations have been limited to the general introduction of fundamental concepts of Fintech business models, and comprehensive research of their challenges has not been presented through the review methods. Therefore, the aim of present study is to fill the scientific gap in this area by reviewing the challenges of each Fintech business model and depicting a paradigm model of their relationship to create a conceptual network between studies.

In line with the research objectives, this research has used the systematic literature review (SLR). Each systematic review consists of eight main steps. For this purpose, by referring to English and Persian articles published in valid foreign and domestic databases, in all spatial zones and in the period of 2014-2021, the large number of initial articles were identified. By obtaining 44 articles eligible for the entry criteria, among screening sampling method, a systematic review of the research was started and with the help of qualitative content analysis, the intended semantic codes were extracted. Then, with the help of inference, which is the main research tool in content analysis; Extracted codes of synthesis and concepts related to the theoretical body of fintech challenges were obtained. In order to analyze the selected articles, Shannon's entropy content analysis method has been used for identifying and ranking the codes and concepts. Also, to clarify whether the categories obtained from the challenges of foreign platforms are generalizable to other developing countries, such as Iran; The related domestic scientific literature was referred to in order to obtain more reliable results by comparing the findings of these two categories.

According to the findings obtained from the review of forty four selected articles, twenty four concepts from combination of thirty eight codes led to the emergence of eight categories of main challenges of fintech business models which are presented in the form of paradigm model with different dimensions of Fintech challenges. Based on this diagram, regulation, immoral problems, customer support, gaining customer trust, financial problems, technology, safety and business environment are the most important challenges that fintech companies are facing in this century.

Results show that the lack of a detailed regulatory framework by governing institutions, along with the problems of information security and existing operational risks, has faced the development of Fintech business models with significant challenges. In other words, the challenges caused by the regulatory factors eventually end up in financial problems and the provision of capital resources, and ultimately result in failure and decline for these companies. In addition to all the challenges of fintech development in the international environment, economic sanctions, lack of support for inventions, inefficient and insufficient human resources and inaccessibility of capital sources are special problems that makes development process of Iranian fintechs harder than it is.