This article is about my little experience with fintech. I had a chance to look into fintech when I chose it as my research topic in the master program. My focus at the time was fintech regulation in Vietnam. For some reason, research in that area was so ambitious and risky. First, there is very little research about this particular topic in Vietnam. Second, I had no prior research experience. Third, I had no expertise in fintech. And yet I chose it simply because I want to learn about it.
Why I am interested in fintech
The FSB (Financial Stability Board) defined fintech as technology-enabled innovation in financial services. These innovations will affect many different areas of financial services. I am a future-oriented person and very curious about all potential of fintech. I want to explore what fintech could do, what areas will be disrupted, and how it will change my future life.
So why I chose fintech regulation rather than the potential impacts of fintech on Vietnam’s financial market? I had no idea why at the time. It is just the fact that the financial market in Vietnam is so minor compared to the global one. Fintech is quite a general field that can be divided into different major branches. Also, I have no prior experience with fintech. Therefore, I was a little confused when choosing the research topic, which somehow impacted the quality of my project submission. But anyway, I learned a lot after doing this research and am grateful that I did it.
What I had to do
My task in the project was to select an area of interest, then justify and formulate a research proposal for the chosen area of focus. The project was more academic and assessed the theoretical frameworks of research methods. It was not an actual study, just constructing a research plan that must follow several required components, such as research rationales, aims, objectives, literature review, research philosophy, research design, and so on.
I had to write and present the research proposal in a professional format within a 3500 words count limit.
What challenges and what I did
The tasks were relatively simple for someone in academia, but it was a big challenge for me, who had little or barely business & management research experience. I must study hard to understand what research is, what research paradigms are, the differences between five management philosophies, and many more. Part of the challenges was to perceive the meaning of positivism, critical realism, interpretivism, postmodernism and pragmatism. Then I had to select the one I wanted to drive my research into. One more thing is the approaches for theory development, comprising deduction, induction and abduction. Consuming these new terms took me a lot of time and effort. It was so academic. I had no idea about these terms before. I read them, reread them again and again, try to digest all these academic terms, then apply them to my topic.
My topic is lack of specification, confusing me in figuring out what I want to achieve. I chose fintech as my area of interest. That was my mistake as the area was so broad and too new to me at the time. I read and read a lot. I looked through all related publications of IFM, FSB, BIS, World Bank regarding Fintech to grab a view of fintech and regulatory approaches. I also examined books, journals, and academic articles about fintech from various resources. It was time-consuming to peruse all these pieces, but it really paid off.
What I learned
I went from nothing to something. Yet I started with no research experience and no fintech knowledge but gained so many things along the way. Now I have an overview of what research is all about and how to do it. I am confident in critically writing an article review and examining how authors do research. And I did that once in BA program and got a good mark for a review of “Analyzing the risk in the supply chain of apparel industry during an epidemic outbreak” by Perera, Wijayanayake, and Peter. That is another story I may write about it later on.
Of course, I learned a lot about fintech. Most of the papers in my reading resources focused on the emergence of AI, ML in financial services sectors, potential opportunities & risks to the industry, emerging trends, policy approaches, lessons from forerunners and jurisdictions worldwide. I familiarized myself with terms like open banking, blockchain, distributed ledger technology (DLT), CDBC, Big Tech and Incumbent Bank, P2P lending, regulatory sandboxes, crowdfunding, cross-border payments, you name it. I was amazed by the opportunities of innovative technologies like blockchain, how CDBC might change the business models of traditional banks, how some big techs expand into financial services. Yet fintech is broad in nature and there are many new things for me to explore further.
Photo by Jonas Leupe