Financial Technology: Review of Trends, Approaches and Management

Technological innovation and digitization have posed a challenge to the financial sector globally. Fintech is the term used to designate the application of new technologies to financial services. The aim of the study is to analyse this research subject worldwide during the period 1975–2019. To this end, bibliometric techniques were applied to 2012 articles, obtaining findings of the productivity of scientific research, of the main thematic axes and their evolution. Scientific activity increased, mainly in the past decade, with 45% of publications. The main thematic areas were Business, Management and Accounting, Engineering, Social Sciences and Computer Science. Seven research lines were identified, aimed at analysing the aspects financial, economic, technology transfer, investment, innovation, partnerships and institutions and commercial. Future research lines should develop analyses on banking, financial services trade, territorial development, legal, management, research methodologies and the sustainability of financial technologies. It was verified that there is a growing and dynamic interest in scientific activity on financial technologies at an international level. The findings obtained are a complement to the knowledge of financial technologies and allow the relationship between science and technology to be established, and to inform the decision-making process

Soft computing in finance and economics

The field of Soft Computing covers a wide range of techniques that are tolerant to the presence of uncertainty and imprecision. This feature is key in areas like Finance and Economics, where the opposite is rather the exception than the rule. For this reason, there is a growing interest in applications of the mentioned toolkit in the domain. This special track intends to address that demand introducing a diverse set of papers that cover a wide range of novel techniques and interesting solutions in core areas of application. All of them represent substantial contributions to the literature.The authors acknowledge financial support granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science under contract TIN2011-28336 (MOVES