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1. Introduction
The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 significantly decreased customer trust in financial services, and helped spark the growth of financial technology or “Fintech” ventures (Muzellec et al., 2015). Fintech offerings challenge the status quo of mainstream banking (Zhang et al., 2016), and range from peer-to-peer (P2P) lending (Pena et al., 2018) to cryptocurrencies (Nakamoto, 2008), or applications of blockchain technology that omit intermediaries in financial service processes (Nofer et al., 2017), and represent a $5bn market in the USA alone (Zavolokina et al., 2016).
The digital transformation of financial services and the associated growth of Fintech are enabled through information and communication technologies (ICT). These enhance the accessibility and availability of resources in service systems (e.g. resource “density”), as well as their transferability (e.g. resource “liquefaction”), thus resulting in new technology-enabled value co-creation processes (Breidbach and Maglio, 2016; Lusch and Nambisan, 2015). Given recent technological advances, the pervasive impact of ICT on financial service is unsurprising, and investigating the implications of ICT in service more broadly represents a key service research priority (Ostrom et al., 2010, 2015). However, existing contributions in the service research discipline have been criticized in that they “failed to offer insights on emerging digital service innovations” (Lusch and Nambisan, 2015, p. 172) in general, and understanding of Fintech as an emerging service context, in particular (Breidbach and Ranjan, 2017). This gap in knowledge is partially rooted in the fact that ICT and service research have traditionally been conducted in disciplinary silos (Brust et al., 2017), and is further amplified by the increasing speed at which new disruptive technologies emerge (Christensen, 2006). Consequently, managerially relevant insights on how to manage Fintech are unavailable to date.
Against this backdrop, we argue that Fintech represents a unique opportunity for service research to contribute new knowledge about the digital transformation of financial services more generally, and helps address managerial and societal challenges therein. In addition, service research exploring Fintech and the digital transformation of financial service systems provides a unique opportunity to advance theoretical insights about the role of ICT in service more broadly. Actual guidelines, however, on how to conduct theoretically, managerially and societally relevant service research related to Fintech, for example, through systematically...