Abstract/Summary

Fintech companies have become significant players in the financial services industry through the release of innovative and disruptive technologies. They enjoy increasing success locally and globally by delivering new forms of financial products and services. Despite the commercial, economic, and social success of fintech companies, there are few studies of fintech as a field. This has led to calls for a new type of research focus where fintech is studied as an emerging institutional field. This research tested the hypothesis that fintech companies have evolved from disparate organisations into an institutional field which is separate from the traditional financial services institutional field. I conducted an empirical interpretive qualitative case study in Ghana with 41 participants from 14 fintech companies, regulators, and associations. Employing institutional theory, I addressed the role of institutional pressures in transitioning heterogeneous fintech companies into a homogenous institutional field. Then I highlighted how the emerging fintech field is becoming embedded in society through the processes of deinstitutionalisation and institutionalisation. The findings explicate how coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures on fintech actors, and the wider financial services field contributed to the evolution of the fintech field. The findings link the responses of fintech companies to the creation of structure, identity, and values for the fintech field. Finally, the findings demonstrate how fintech companies use technology mediated practices to embed the field into social life.