Citation: Aysan, A.F.; Nanaeva, Z. Fintech as a Financial Disruptor: A Bibliometric Analysis. FinTech 2022, 1, 412–433. https://doi.org/10.3390/ fintech1040031 Academic Editor: David Roubaud Received: 25 October 2022 Accepted: 2 December 2022 Published: 8 December 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Article Fintech as a Financial Disruptor: A Bibliometric Analysis Ahmet F. Aysan * and Zhamal Nanaeva * College of Islamic Studies, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Education City, Doha P.O. Box 34110, Qatar * Correspondence: aaysan@hbku.edu.qa (A.F.A.); zhna33940@hbku.edu.qa (Z.N.) Abstract: The present-day financial system is being influenced by the rapid development of Fintech (financial technology), which comprises technologies created to improve and automate traditional forms of finance for businesses and consumers. The topic of Fintech as a financial disruptor is gaining popularity in line with the swift spread of digitalization across the banking industry, whereby this paper contributes to the field by presenting a novel bibliometric analysis of the academic literature related to Fintech as a financial disruptor. The analysis is based on metadata extracted from the Scopus database through the VOSviewer and Biblioshiny software. The bibliometric analysis of 363 documents identifies the most impactful sources of publication, keywords, authors, and most cited documents on the topic of Fintech as a financial disruptor. As our analysis demonstrates, the number of publications on the given topic is increasing, indicating both interest among academia and potential for future research. Keywords: Fintech; disruption; transformation; bibliometric analysis 1. Introduction Fintech, referring to financial technologies, can be defined as exploiting innovative technologies to deliver financial services (Cai, 2018 [1]). The term is broad and suggests a digital product, a startup or even a legacy provider (PwC, 2016) [2]. Fintech has gained momentum in the last quarter of the 20th century and has been rapidly expanding across the globe. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, while negatively affecting many industries, became a catalyst for the rapid digitalization of various businesses, including financial services. According to Deloitte (2020) [3], the pandemic contributed to the genera- tion of the second wave of development and penetration of new financial technologies into traditional sectors. Since September 2018, the performance of Fintech company shares has outperformed that of their traditional counterparts, and the gap has increased significantly since the outbreak of COVID-19 (Deloitte, 2020) [3]. According to Statista (2021) [4], total investments in Fintech reached USD 33.9 billion by the first quarter of 2019. Moreover, al- most 75% of global consumers had some interaction with Fintech in 2019 (Statista, 2021) [4], while Deloitte (2020) predicts that the global revenue of Fintech companies will grow by 11.7% from 2019 to 2024. The rapid expansion of Fintech companies has been achieved by successfully targeting unbanked customers, which incumbent financial institutions often overlook. At the same time, through the digitalization of financial services, Fintech has been targeting a broader customer base through providing more convenient, diverse, and affordable financial ser- vices. Thus, innovation and new business models have allowed Fintech to spread across the industry and enter the customer segment of the existing financial service providers. Hence, Fintech represents an excellent illustration of the disruptive innovation theory, introduced by Clayton, M. Christensen in 1995 (Christensen & Euchner, 2015) [5]. According to this theory, disruptive innovation is a process that occurs when a small enterprise with limited resources enters the market by targeting customers neglected by incumbents. In doing so, the small enterprise adopts innovative solutions and gradually expands its customer base into the business of the incumbent enterprise (Christensen & Euchner, 2015) [5]. FinTech 2022, 1, 412–433. https://doi.org/10.3390/fintech1040031 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/fintech