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Strategic coupling between finance, technology and the state: Cultivating a Fintech ecosystem for incumbent finance

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-11-18, 11:37 authored by Reijer Hendrikse, Michiel Van-Meeteren, David Bassens
The rise of Fintech challenges established financial centres and incumbent financial institutions to rethink their strategies to remain obligatory passage points in the age of digitizing finance. To appreciate these changes, it isimportantto maintain theoretical interchange between developments in financial geography and economic geography, its parent discipline. In this paper, we argue that the ways in which evolutionary economic geography impacts strategic coupling in global financial networks are crucial to grasp tomorrow’s geographies of Fintech. Through an in-depth examination of Brussels, we analyze the potential of Fintech opening a window of locational opportunity in financial services. Belgium has put together a strategy to seize this window by leveraging its politically neutral image and Brussels’ existing niche in financial collaboration and infrastructural plumbing. The latter status is exemplified by the presence of global players SWIFT and Euroclear. We analyze how Belgian entrepreneurs and politicians assess Brussels’ locational resources, and strategically couple big financial institutions with small tech startups in order to cultivate a Fintech ecosystem in the service of incumbent finance, constituting a FinTech-State triangle. As such, we document and analyze how the coalescence of finance and technology offers new opportunities for second-tier financial centres, whilst highlighting the difficulties in reaping these in practice.

Funding

Innoviris grant BRGEOZ289, Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) G019116N

ESRC grant ES/S010416/1

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Volume

52

Issue

8

Pages

1516 - 1538

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© the Authors

Publisher statement

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x19887967. Users who receive access to an article through a repository are reminded that the article is protected by copyright and reuse is restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses. Users may also download and save a local copy of an article accessed in an institutional repository for the user's personal reference. For permission to reuse an article, please follow our Process for Requesting Permission.

Acceptance date

2019-10-21

Publication date

2019-11-11

Copyright date

2019

ISSN

0308-518X

eISSN

1472-3409

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Michiel Van Meeteren Deposit date: 16 November 2019

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