Making the world a better place with fintech research

Financial technology (fintech) is seen as possessing significant potential to provide the poor access to financial services and help them escape the clutches of poverty. Surprisingly, Information Systems (IS) research has engaged little with fintech's promise of fostering financial inclusion for the poor. In the spirit of ‘making a better world with ICTs’, conducting ‘responsible IS research for a better world’ and ‘understanding and tackling societal grand challenges through management research’, we advance a framework for guiding IS research on fintech‐led financial inclusion. Drawing on the IS literature and Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) scholarship, we extrapolate five areas of research that can better illuminate fintech's contributions to financial inclusion: (a) business strategies for fintech‐led financial inclusion; (b) digital artifacts of fintech‐led financial inclusion; (c) business environment of fintech‐led financial inclusion; (d) microfoundations of fintech for financial inclusion; (e) developmental impacts of fintech. We conclude with a discussion of how the five areas offer opportunities for impactful research on fintech and the promise of building a financially inclusive society.


| INTRODUCTION
Financial technology (fintech) has become front-page news in recent years. In its broadest meaning, fintech is the application of technological innovations to financial services and processes. 1 Recent annual data show global fintech investments of USD$135.7 billion (KPMG, 2019). 2 Startups, established technology firms and banks have emerged as key players in this growing sector (Gomber et al., 2018a(Gomber et al., , 2018bGozman et al., 2018;Hendrikse et al., 2018).
Policymakers and regulators view fintech as an opportunity to make the financial system 'more efficient, effective and resilient' (Carney, 2017, p. 12).
Fintech innovations promise to provide the poor access to financial services such as payments, savings, credit and insurance. A total of 1.7 billion people worldwide, most of whom live in developing countries, are excluded from these basic financial services, hindering their ability to escape the clutches of poverty (Demirgüç-Kunt et al., 2018, p. 4). Fintech innovations resonate with calls for 'making a better world with ICTs' (Walsham, 2012), 'responsible IS research for a better world' (ISJ, 2019b) 'understanding and tackling societal grand challenges through management research' (George et al., 2016) because of their potential to enhance financial inclusion for the poor-that is, 'ensuring access to financial services […] by vulnerable groups such as weaker sections and low-income groups at an affordable cost' (Rangarajan in RBI, 2008, p. 297). 3 This article advances this noble definition of 'financial inclusion' as the delivery of financial services to the poor, unbanked and marginalised. International development organisations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have projected fintech's ability to deliver financial inclusion as an effective approach to poverty reduction (GPFI, 2016(GPFI, , 2017. A vision of fintech-led financial inclusion appears to have burst on the global scene, one that takes to heart the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially: SDG1 (no poverty); SDG2 (zero hunger); SDG8 (decent work and economic growth); and SDG10 (reduced inequalities) (UNSGSA, 2018).
Information Systems (IS) journals are seeing an explosion of research publications on fintech. However, despite this excitement around fintech in the IS community, much of the research is disconnected from the financial inclusion agenda. A notable exception to this detachment is the Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) stream of IS, which we will refer to later in this article. IS research's disengagement with fintech-led financial inclusion is evident in how articles either do not refer to financial inclusion at all or use the term in a perfunctory manner with limited focus on the provision of financial services for the poor.
The main purpose of this article is to highlight opportunities for IS scholars to take an ethical turn and explicitly align their fintech research with the pro-poor financial inclusion agenda. To this end, we provide a framework that can guide future IS research on fintech-led financial inclusion. Our objective is not to offer a critique of existing fintech research in IS. We acknowledge the relevance of published IS research on fintech and the valuable insights they continue to generate for several business stakeholders and policymakers. Fintech initiatives are set to make the financial services industry more innovative and competitive and we are not questioning the IS community's natural excitement to study this business landscape. Rather, in this article, we suggest ways in which IS research can be an integral part of a research agenda to foster financial inclusion and fight poverty through fintech innovations.
The rest of the article is structured as follows. In Section 2, we review IS research on fintech and highlight its limited engagement with the financial inclusion agenda. We then draw on the IS literature and a small group of ICT4D studies to extrapolate five areas of research that can better inform analyses of fintech's potential to enhance the financial inclusion of the poor: (a) business strategies for fintech-led financial inclusion; (b) digital artifacts of fintech-led financial inclusion; (c) business environment of fintech-led financial inclusion; (d) microfoundations of fintech for financial inclusion; (e) developmental impacts of fintech. In Section 3, we build on these five areas to discuss research opportunities around fintech and its promise of fostering pro-poor financial inclusion.

| IS research on fintech
The IS community has taken significant interest in fintech. Table 1 is an overview of 121 papers on fintech published between 2000 and 2020 in the AIS Senior Scholars' Basket of Journals and other prominent IS journals in the 'Information Management' subject area of the UK's Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS) Academic Journal Guide. Appendix A details the literature review approach, which helped create Table 1. We searched for keywords that are broad enough to capture the wide range of fintech research in IS. Querying keywords for the 2000 to 2020 period allowed us to source IS journal articles on financial technologies that are relevant to our analysis, including those papers that may not have explicitly adopted the term 'fintech' or used the term in its present-day connotation-that is, innovative technologies and organisations that have disrupted the financial services industry since the 2008 global financial crisis.
Notably, fintech is increasingly a popular choice for journal special issues. The Journal of Management Information Systems has published a special issue titled 'Financial information systems and the fintech revolution' (Gomber et al., 2018b).
Another special issue titled 'Fintech-innovating the financial industry through emerging information technologies' is in progress at Information Systems Research (Hendershott et al., 2017). The IS community's growing attention to fintech is also visible in the increasing number of papers on financial technologies being presented at major IS conferences such as the However, within this growing body of IS research on fintech, financial inclusion-that is, the delivery of financial services to the poor, unbanked and marginalised-has received scarce attention. Even when financial inclusion is touched upon (see column 4 in Table 1 for the few IS studies on fintech that refer to financial inclusion), the poor are invariably not the focus. Fintech research (both IS and non-IS) is witnessing an expansion of the scope of the term 'financial inclusion', incorporating within its remit a wide spectrum of consumers and business initiatives, and going way beyond the term's original focus on helping the poor (United Nations, 2006, p. iii). When international development organisations started using the term 'financial inclusion' in the 2000s (Gabor & Brooks, 2017;Mader, 2016;Soederberg, 2013), they were referring to financial services for the poor. At that time, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urged stakeholders to 'empower the poor and to ensure that poor people around the world have access to a wider range of financial services' (United Nations, 2006, p. iii). The relatively recent expansion of the notion of financial inclusion-with the help of consultants and marketers-away from its original intent allows a range of actors to jump on the 'fintech for financial inclusion' bandwagon (Bateman, 2012;Bull, 2019). However, it may eventually trivialise the term and reduce its potential for generating developmental impacts. We would therefore suggest that IS research on fintech needs to focus on the unbanked and contexts of poverty alleviation when conceptualising and applying the notion of financial inclusion. 5 IS research has investigated instantiations of fintech innovations (e.g., crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending), the underpinning digital technologies (e.g., blockchain, artificial intelligence), and how tech firms and financial incumbents compete and cooperate to innovate financial services. This body of research also offers regulators and policymakers useful ideas on how to maximise fintech's potential for customer value while minimising the risks to financial stability (Gomber et al., 2018a, p. 254). Thus, despite its limited attention to financial inclusion and poverty alleviation per se, recent IS research has described the focal actors, practices and technologies of the so-called 'fintech revolution' (The Economist, 2015), creating also a heightened awareness of how fintech innovations can offer novel products and services. In this sense, IS research provides helpful clues to uncover the key dimensions of fintech-led financial inclusion in greater depth. We examined the research findings of the 121 selected IS studies on fintech (Table 1 and Appendix A) and derived four thematic areas covering related ideas in the literature, namely: business strategies; digital artifacts; business environment; microfoundations (see Table 2 for an overview of the four thematic areas; see Appendix A for a full elaboration of our coding scheme). These four thematic areas emerging from existing IS scholarship can form the building blocks of a roadmap for IS research on fintech and the promise of financial inclusion.
First, IS research's focus on fintech business strategies draws attention to the development of fintech business models, fintech firms' strategic positioning in global markets, their interactions with stakeholders and the configuration of organisational resources for business sustainability (see e.g., Gomber et al., 2018a;Gozman et al., 2018;Kazan et al., 2018). Ideas from this body of work explicate the processes of developing commercially viable fintech innovations. They are, thus, well placed to inform fintech research that explores the development and implementation of business strategies in the pursuit of overt financial inclusion goals. Second, IS scholarship on digital artifacts directs attention to the management of digital infrastructures (Zachariadis et al., 2019) and the specific technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, blockchain and cloud computing) that underpin the design and delivery of financial services . This research can be especially relevant for conceptualising, developing and evaluating digital tools that fully account for the contextual conditions of poor communities at the receiving end of fintech innovations. Third, research on the business environment of fintech highlights the work of users of fintech services such as peer-to-peer lending (Jiang et al., 2018;Riggins & Weber, 2017;Xu & Chau, 2018) and explores the environmental drivers that support fintech innovations-for example, through the monitoring of algorithmic trading (Cooper et al., 2017), the use of regulatory technology (or 'regtech') in financial markets (Currie et al., 2018) and an effective regulation of mobile payments (Liu et al., 2015).  We analysed the research findings of the ICT4D literature on financial inclusion and synthesised four broad themes:

| ICT4D studies on financial inclusion
business strategies for financial inclusion; digital artifacts of financial inclusion; business environment of financial inclusion; developmental impacts of fintech (see Table 4 for an overview of the four thematic areas; see Appendix B for a full elaboration of our coding scheme). The framing and positioning of ICT4D research are similar to mainstream IS research in so far that it discusses ideas about business strategies, digital artifacts and business environment, but with an explicit emphasis on poor communities and financial inclusion goals. Importantly, unlike most IS research, ICT4D studies strive to explore the developmental impacts of financial technologies on poor and marginalised communities. In particular, we see a focus on the outcomes of pro-poor financial literacy initiatives and women empowerment interventions in marginalised areas.
Overall, as indicated in Table 4, this set of ICT4D research articles suggests opportunities for the thematic areas of mainstream IS research to be contextualised around financial inclusion.
In the next section, we draw on ideas around business strategies, digital artifacts, the business environment of fintech, the microfoundations of fintech entrepreneurship, and the developmental impacts of fintech to offer and discuss a framework for IS research on fintech-led financial inclusion.

| FINTECH AND THE PROMISE OF FINANCIAL INCLUSION: A RESEARCH AGENDA
The above review and synthesis highlight five areas of opportunities for the IS community to examine fintech-led financial inclusion as an important phenomenon.  Having an undogmatic attitude to research is likely to lead to 'a more holistic analysis and a more effective outcome with corresponding implications for both practice and scholarly learning' (Davison & Martinson, 2011, p. 289).  Second, there are opportunities to study business strategies and their operationalization-that is, how fintech firms strategize to pursue a financial inclusion mission. A strategy-as-practice perspective (Morton et al., 2020;Vaara & Whittington, 2012) would be particularly useful in this regard. What decisions do fintech firms make concerning the portfolio of pro-poor financial services and the geographical scope of their service delivery? How do fintech firms price their services to benefit the poor? How do they ensure the sustainability of their socially oriented business models? How do funding and revenue streams impact financial inclusion outcomes? For example, while Rang De directs its portfolio of services towards marginalised communities in India (Rang De, 2020a), Kiva has a presence in 77 countries with 3.6 million borrowers and 1.9 million lenders (Kiva, 2020a). Although Rang De's geographical scope poses limits to the scaling of the enterprise, such self-imposed restrictions arguably allow for deep and significant involvement in local communities and close monitoring of socio-economic impact-an aspect that could positively differentiate Rang De's strategies from its competitors. Moreover, while Rang De has recently transitioned to a for-profit legal status and currently funds its operations through membership fees and interest rate repayments (Rang De, 2020a, 2020b), Kiva continues to cover its operating costs through donations, philanthropic grants and platform fees paid by partnering local organisations (Kiva, 2020b). Investigating the strategies of inclusion-oriented fintech firms could illuminate the processes of disrupting market structures and enhancing customer experience through pro-poor financial services. The 'fintech innovation matrix' (Gomber et al., 2018a) could be a useful analytical tool to frame such research. Furthermore, studying fintech-led financial inclusion from a business strategy perspective is an opportunity to create new knowledge about the scaling and sustaining of impactoriented business models (Seelos & Mair, 2017).

T A B L E 4 Four thematic areas of ICT4D research on financial inclusion
Third, IS research can address a range of important questions around culture, identity and talent management in inclusive fintech business models-in other words, how do firms manage the challenges of conflicting organisational identities? When fintech firms explicitly articulate a financial inclusion mission, they typically manage twin organisational identities-that is, a socially oriented identity and a business-oriented identity. The simultaneous sustenance of intrinsically contrasting identities requires careful organisation of mutually incompatible internal systems (and individuals)-a process that could pose tricky questions for senior management teams. Organisations could face internal conflicts when taking money from fintech investors who are less interested in the firms' financial inclusion aims and more interested in financial returns. Similarly, senior management teams can face the difficult task of attracting and retaining employees, who may want to switch to less socially focused fintech companies that can pay better salaries. The 'hybrid organising' (Battilana & Lee, 2014;Mair et al., 2015) of inclusion-seeking fintech firmsespecially the balancing of commercial and social objectives-is thus a worthwhile topic for further research. On the other hand, research could also explore the internal processes and mechanisms of organising when fintech firms achieve significant financial inclusion outcomes without being preoccupied with socially oriented objectives.
IS research into the business strategies for fintech-led financial inclusion can be conducted through a variety of research design, research strategies and methods (Bell et al., 2019). For instance, as interpretivist researchers, we would be inclined to address the question of how firms manage conflicting organisational identities through a longitudinal case study design and a qualitative research strategy that uses methods such as participant observation and semi-structured interviews. However, we leave it to researchers to choose methods they deem suitable and experiment with methodological pluralism. Overall, IS research into business strategies for fintech-led financial inclusion can help fintech practitioners better manage the challenges of strategizing and organising for social impact.

| Digital artifacts of fintech-led financial inclusion
Fintech firms deploy a wide variety of digital and mobile technologies to deliver financial services. The design of such technologies and their implementation in pursuit of financial inclusion is a fruitful area for scholarly investigation.
IS research has explored the technological innovations that are transforming banking, capital markets and insurance. For instance, Gozman et al. (2018) have considered fintech innovations as core services (e.g., front-end technologies with which users interact directly), business infrastructure (e.g., middle office and back-office technologies complementing core services) and components (e.g., the underlying technologies supporting core services and business infrastructure). Future research needs to investigate the design and implementation of such technological innovations for low-income and marginalised groups. Some recent examples highlight research possibilities in this regard. Leonardi et al. (2016) have discussed the design and implementation of banking technologies that the poor can 'appropriate' depending on their habits and needs. Similarly, the case of WorldRemit-a London-based money transfer provider-shows how technologies like smartphone apps can be developed with the unbanked in mind, allowing beneficiaries in developing countries to receive remittances on their mobile money accounts or as airtime credit (Shemkus, 2015).
Furthermore, IS research on fintech has started exploring the technologies of credit risk evaluation used by peer-to-peer lending platforms (see e.g., Wang et al., 2020). New empirical research is needed to better explicate how such algorithms take into account poor and excluded communities. Fintech innovations have often glorified algorithmic capabilities and their supposedly objective decision-making. Yet, in reality, much of the algorithmic detail is shrouded in opaqueness rather than transparency (Pasquale, 2015). Such opaque nature of algorithms makes it difficult to decode, for instance, how peer-to-peer technologies match lenders to borrowers and how they fix interest rates that can benefit the poor. The emerging literature on 'learning algorithms' and artificial intelligence in organisations (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2020;Faraj et al., 2018;Lyytinen et al., 2020) could offer an ideal analytical context to study the design of algorithmic technologies and their impacts on the poor.
Finally, inclusion-oriented fintech firms encode attributes such as empathy, fairness and sensitivity in the aesthetics of front-end digital artifacts. For example, both Rang De and Kiva make extensive use of images on their online and mobile platforms through which they aim at building an empathic relationship between lenders and borrowers. More work is needed to explore the role of digital aesthetics and visualisations in building credibility among stakeholders, attracting lenders, and improving the user experience. Exploring the aesthetics of digital artifacts for financial inclusion is an opportunity to engage with studies on 'organisational visuality' (Boxenbaum et al., 2018;Lagna & Lenglet, 2020;Meyer et al., 2013) and, more broadly, the 'aesthetics' of organisational life (Strati, 1999).
Thus far, IS research on fintech has not dealt with these aspects, despite the 'digital' being a ubiquitous aesthetical brand of the fintech revolution.
Research on the digital artifacts of fintech-led financial inclusion can be approached through several methodological strategies. For example, the question of how the aesthetic attributes of fintech apps impact the user experience of lowincome groups could be addressed both through comparative case study designs and experiments. The thematic area of digital artifacts also lends itself to design science (Hevner et al., 2004) and design thinking (Micheli et al., 2019)-based research, and the creation of technological artifacts that squarely address problems of financial inclusion.

| Business environment of fintech-led financial inclusion
Fintech-led financial inclusion is not just the work of fintech firms but is built on the actions of stakeholders such as business partners, customers, governments, civil society organisations and philanthropic foundations in the broader environ- Second, quantitative research on the acceptance and use of fintech innovations by the poor (Senyo & Osabute, 2020) together with studies on the diffusion of fintech innovations in developing countries (Lashitew et al., 2019) could offer useful analytical frameworks to explore fintech-led financial inclusion from the end-user perspective. Ethnographic studies about the 'portfolios of the poor' (Collins et al., 2009) and 'money at the margins' (Maurer et al., 2018) could complement quantitative research on the acceptance and use of fintech innovations.
Particularly, semi-structured interviews through so-called 'financial diaries' (Collins et al., 2009, pp. 6-13) are useful to capture how the poor and unbanked manage small and irregular sums of money through informal financial practices.
Finally, policymaking and regulation at the regional, national and sub-national levels to support fintech-led financial inclusion is a fruitful area of research enquiry. Public-private partnerships have helped establish numerous fintech hubs around the world, the most famous of which are London, New York, the Silicon Valley area, Hong Kong and Singapore (Deloitte, 2017). Numerous hubs have also started to emerge in the Global South, such as the Mumbai Fintech Hub and the Fintech Valley Vizag (Medici, 2019). These developments raise many worthwhile research questions around the organisation of fintech hubs and the extent to which they create spaces for financial inclusion as an agenda of 'transformative innovation policy' (Schot & Steinmueller, 2018).
Overall, studying the business environment of fintech-led financial inclusion will create opportunities for the IS community to engage with policymakers, fintech firms, fintech hub representatives, development organisations and philanthropic foundations working on pro-poor financial inclusion projects. IS research on fintech could critically examine how and whether fintech innovations intrude into the lives of poor people as a form of 'surveillance capitalism' (Zuboff, 2019). The fintech revolution has brought into the spotlight how fintech firms can use digital technologies to 'de-risk' those who have no bank accounts and credit histories-that is, low-income individuals who may be perceived as too risky to lend to, unless sky-high interest rates are charged to them (Kaminska, 2015). Fintech innovations promise to leverage alternative data derived from unbanked individuals'

| Microfoundations of fintech for financial inclusion
behavioural patterns-such as their use of mobile phones or social media-to create algorithms that assess their creditworthiness (Gabor & Brooks, 2017). Although IS research on fintech has noted such algorithmic technologies (see e.g., Gozman et al., 2018, p. 167), more work is needed on the impacts that alternative credit algorithms-and their underlying behavioural analytics-have on poor people's agency and empowerment; how alternative credit algorithms may reinforce existing forms of social discrimination (Eubanks, 2015;Noble, 2018); how alternative forms of credit assessment may transform the poor into generators of securitized assets to be traded on global financial markets (Gabor & Brooks, 2017). These questions provide an ideal platform to conduct interdisciplinary and methodologically pluralist research on what may be termed 'fintech for development' (F4D), bringing in scholarly insights and expertise from IS, ICT4D, international political economy, organisation theory and other cognate fields.
In researching the developmental impacts of fintech, it is crucial to remember that fintech innovations are in many cases about for-profit firms offering market-based solutions to problems of financial exclusion. Such firms may be focused more on advancing their own commercial interests rather than working to maximise social welfare, equality and achieve sustainable developmental goals. Besides intruding into poor people's lives and commodifying their digital footprints, fintech firms may raise non-market barriers to keep out competitors, leaving low-income groups with fewer and expensive digital financial services. Furthermore, they may lower risk assessment standards to increase profits and externalise the costs deriving from a default, potentially compromising macro-financial stability (GPFI, 2016). The rise and fall of aggressive peer-to-peer lenders in China are testimony to the dangers of a fintech sector growing unchecked (Liu, 2018). By interacting with policymakers and civil society organisations, IS scholars could play an important role in co-creating institutional frameworks (e.g., regulations that mitigate against risky lending and borrowing via peer-to-peer lending platforms) that address the 'dark sides' of fintech-led financial inclusion, protecting low-income users of fintech services and making sure that fintech innovations are a force for good.

| CONCLUDING REMARKS
In this article, we drew attention to the scarcity of IS research on fintech-led financial inclusion and discussed five areas of research opportunities. Our arguments have moral and ethical overtones. We invoke 'responsible IS research for a better world' (ISJ, 2019b), 'making a better world with ICTs' (Walsham, 2012) and 'understanding and tackling societal grand challenges through management research' (George et al., 2016) with the explicit objective of encouraging IS research on a topic of global significance: fintech innovation as a means to achieve financial inclusion and reduce global poverty. There is also an implicit suggestion in our paper: the creation of a body of published, expert knowledge about the achievements (and pitfalls) of financial inclusion through fintech is a virtuous endeavour because it facilitates the greater good in society. But is it even plausible that new IS research on fintech-led financial inclusion will help fight global poverty? A sobering observation is in order.
Academic studies of fintech and financial inclusion are unlikely to directly foster far-reaching financial inclusion outcomes on their own. We are not making the naïve claim that production of novel theoretical insights, conceptual categories and explanatory theory related to fintech and financial inclusion, on their own, will 'create magic' in society and make the world a better place for the poor. This body of work could face the same critique that many other IS research endeavours confront-they are full of academic rigour, but are they relevant?
It is probable that a proportion of academic research efforts around fintech-led financial inclusion will suffer from the problem of 'high information-action ratios' (Postman, 1985). In other words, they are bound to produce a large volume of information (or 'knowledge') relative to their scope for relevant action in the world of practice and policy. Potentially useful knowledge generated through IS research on fintech will need to be carefully translated and acted upon in the wider society before we see financial inclusion outcomes. In this regard, While recognising the limitations above, we would argue that developing a corpus of IS research on fintech-led financial inclusion is fundamental to the creation of innovative and sustainable approaches in the fight against global poverty. Without being too optimistic, it is conceivable that at least some of the research insights will inspire positive, meaningful action in the policymaking, practitioner and academic communities. The five areas of research discussed in our paper are a step in this direction.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We thank the Newton Fund Researcher Links Workshop Grant for partially funding this project.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.  (2015) pointed out, the 'magical combination of geeks in T-shirts and venture capital that has disrupted other industries has put financial services in its sights'. However, practitioners have occasionally used the term fintech since the 1970s-for example, as a name for business projects at the interface between finance and technology (Bettinger, 1972;Hochstein, 2015). This is hardly surprising considering that banks, stock exchanges and other financial organisations have historically been large users of technology (Arner et al., 2016). Our definition of fintech-as the application of technological innovations to financial services and processes-is extensive enough to encompass the historical evolution of fintech from a support area of the financial services industry to a domain where financial organisations and tech firms are focusing their innovation strategies; the actors designing, implementing and using financial technologies, including incumbents (e.g., large banks, asset management firms, legacy technology providers) and newcomers (e.g., fintech startups, big tech firms); the technologies that incumbents and newcomers develop and use; the routine and disruptive application of such technologies to different areas of the financial services industry.

ORCID
2 Data by KPMG (2019) include fintech investments across mergers and acquisitions, private equity and venture capital.
Financial actors' operational spending in technology is not included in the data. In this regard, technology spending by banks is forecast to increase to USD$309 billion by 2022 (Greer et al., 2019). 3 Fintech's potential for enhancing pro-poor financial inclusion also echoes recent calls for studying digital social innovations (DSI), that is, social innovations whose business models rely primarily on digital technologies (ISJ, 2019a). 4 We searched the ICIS and ECIS conference proceedings for working papers on fintech. The search generated 75 results at ICIS and 56 at ECIS in the period between 2015 and 2020. See the AIS eLibrary at https://aisel.aisnet.org 5 According to Demirgüç-Kunt et al. (2018, pp. 35-36), about 1.7 billion adults are unbanked worldwide. Unbanked means not having an account at a financial institution or through a mobile money provider. Most of the unbanked adults live in developing economies and tend to be concentrated among poorer households. Our definition of financial inclusion focuses particularly on the delivery of payments, savings, credit, and insurance services to this large portion of poor and unbanked population worldwide. Concentrating IS research efforts on fintech and the financial inclusion of the poor and unbanked has the potential to create greater developmental impacts (United Nations, 2006, p. iii).
APPENDIX A.

Literature review (IS research on fintech)
We followed the structured approach recommended by Webster and Watson (2002) to source relevant IS studies on fintech.
In the first phase, we chose the Web of Science Core Collection as the main database for our study. We selected a 2000 to 2020 Timespan and searched for the following keywords in Topic (Title, Abstract, Keywords, Keywords Plus): fintech OR 'financial technology' OR 'financial technologies'; fintech AND blockchain; crowdfunding; cryptocurrenc*; cryptocurrenc* AND ethereum; cryptocurrenc* AND bitcoin; 'peer-to-peer lending'; fintech AND regtech; 'algorithmic trading' OR 'high-frequency trading'; fintech AND 'financial inclusion'; 'peer-to-peer lending' AND 'financial inclusion'; crowdfunding AND 'financial inclusion'; blockchain AND 'financial inclusion'; fintech AND microfinance; fintech AND development. We focused our search on articles published in the AIS Senior Scholars' Basket of Journals ('Basket of Eight') and other prominent journals that are part of the 'Information Management' subject area in the UK's ABS Academic Journal Guide. Using the 2000 to 2020 Timespan helped us find IS papers on financial technologies that may not have explicitly adopted the term 'fintech' or used the term in its present-day connotation-that is, innovative technologies and firms disrupting financial services. Our initial search produced 126 articles.
In the second phase, we analysed all results and removed the following 12 studies because they did not engage with financial technology substantially:  Table A1). These articles were published in the following journals:

Literature review (ICT4D research on financial inclusion)
We followed the same structured approach (Webster & Watson, 2002)  In the second phase, we analysed all articles and rejected the following paper, which does not concern financial technology:  Table A2). These articles were published in