How Green FinTech Can Alleviate the Impact of Climate Change—The Case of Switzerland

The financial services industry is currently undergoing a major transformation, with digitization and sustainability being the core drivers. While both concepts have been researched in recent years, their intersection, often conceived as “green FinTech,” remains under-determined. Therefore, this pap...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc
Main Authors Puschmann, Thomas, Hoffmann, Christian, Khmarskyi, Valentyn
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis 01.01.2021
Subjects
Bank technology
Climate change
Financial services
Startups
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Summary:The financial services industry is currently undergoing a major transformation, with digitization and sustainability being the core drivers. While both concepts have been researched in recent years, their intersection, often conceived as “green FinTech,” remains under-determined. Therefore, this paper contributes to this important discussion about green FinTech by, first, synthesizing the relevant literature systematically. Second, it shows the results of an empirical, in-depth analysis of the Swiss FinTech landscape both in terms of green FinTech startups as well as the services offered by the incumbents. The research results show that literature in this new domain has only emerged recently, is mostly characterized by a specific focus on isolated aspects of green FinTech and does not provide a comprehensive perspective on the topic yet. In addition, the results from the literature and the market analysis indicate that green FinTech has an impact along the whole value chain of financial services covering customer-to-customer (c2c), business-to-customer (b2c), and business-to-business (b2b) services. Today the field is predominantly captured by startup companies in contrast to the incumbents whose solutions are still rare.