1. Introduction
Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) include an extensive scale of services that are mainly involved in the business-to-business domain. KIBS involves a set of activities through intermediary inputs that impact the quality and efficiency of firms’ activities, cover a broad spectrum of services, and are tied to the production processes of their clients [
1,
2]. According to Lee and Miozzo [
3], “science-based firms comprise firms in sectors such as software and specialized business services”. Consulting, audit, transaction advisory, taxation, consulting, risk advisory, and technology-oriented firms are part of KIBS, and they add value through the accumulation, creation, or dissemination of knowledge for their client’s needs [
4].
In addition, under the umbrella of KIBS, financial services supply comprehensive access to global financial capital, for instance, credit, saving, and investment [
5]. One example is the so-called FinTech companies, which are organizations based on new technologies and offer digital services (such as mobile payments, crowdfunding, and digital transfers), and are mostly start-ups operating via new digital means. Mosteanu and Faccia [
6] note that, “in general, FinTech companies aim to provide the most innovative financial services which, thanks to digital technologies, can be developed and evolve to bring new benefits to end-users, individual consumers, large companies, or SMEs”. Leong et al. [
7] states that FinTech is a broad umbrella term that describes disruptive technologies in the financial services sector.
Considering the high implication of technology in the FinTech business model, the open innovation paradigm plays a relevant role in promoting the participation of interest groups in certain relevant issues using participatory channels that can lead to an active interaction between users of this type of financial services. Although it might require some efforts to sustain market open innovation by enabling new business models in a business-friendly regulatory environment [
8], attracting investors and new clients with high social awareness could be achieved by demonstrating themes such as sustainable energy, care for the environment, social inclusion, and poverty reduction to maintain the interest of people in these topics. In this sense, corporate social responsibility creates innovation opportunities. In addition, it plays a relevant role concerning the commitment of organizations and their influence to lead initiatives with social content, which may create value [
9].
According to Arner et al. [
10], FinTech firms are a key driver of digital transformation, financial inclusion, and sustainable growth under the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Thus, it may be of interest to compare how participants in the FinTech sector communicate digitally among themselves about innovation to understand their situation. Indeed, the UN acknowledged that innovation [
11] plays an important role in addressing the SDGs. Moreover, the financial sector plays a vital role in the implementation of SDGs because they require a substantial sum of capital flows, investments, and redistribution of funds [
12].
Through the usage of technology, social media opens new channels to spread FinTech firms’ messages, allowing information about their products and services to be shared with clients and partners [
13]; however, not all FinTech companies use social media. The impact of information technology on business and innovation is remarkable [
14], and it has been considered critical to obtain knowledge from the information available in their social media channels. However, the wide range of possibilities related to technologies is also associated with new challenges in understanding the firms’ discourse regarding certain topics. As an example, efforts regarding the data collected from social media are focusing on the development of new products and campaign performance to distinguish the preferences and trends of clients [
15]. Moreover, as a business strategy, social media in innovation-driven companies has been continuously growing, considering the open innovation context, by leveraging digital communication and community tools [
16]. The culture of the business world is continuously evolving, and social problems and FinTech’s challenges are also part of this change. As part of the communication channel of companies implementing the open innovation paradigm, social media is a critical means to obtain valuable information [
17].
The new technologies have generated a “data deluge” that reveals interesting insights from vast quantities of data. The popular microblogging platform Twitter and other social media platforms provide a prime environment for developing a framework that could facilitate information retrieval to support the analysis and management of big data on social media [
18]. Furthermore, firms need to gain business value, incorporating social subjects into their discourse in social media, in addition to interacting with clients and publicizing services and products, among other purposes [
19]. This is mainly because Twitter is a primary communication system in which there is an interest in building communities and creating a virtual environment for the flow of ideas. Indeed, Twitter can be considered to be part of the entrepreneurial innovation ecosystem, and the community of actors interacting with FinTech firms represents a unique scheme to produce inter-organizational streams of sustainable innovation and entrepreneurial behavior [
20,
21].
This research aims to understand how the topics of SDGs and innovation are incorporated into FinTech firms’ public discourse in social media. Therefore, this work intends to answer the following research question: How do Fintech firms incorporate topics of SDGs and innovation into their public discourse based on their social media activities? Hence, the discourse of the FinTech environment—including open innovation and technologies associated—was used to explore text associated with these relevant topics. This research used a quantitative approach based on data analysis from Twitter, implementing a comprehensive social media analysis (SMA). We carried out an exploratory investigation, emphasizing the ninth SDG related to “Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and foster innovation”, and titled “Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure”. However, to differentiate the firms’ focus, we counted innovation separately from the other SDGs search terms. In addition, we conducted general scraping in those terms that refer to the SDGs, either through this acronym or key terms such as sustainability and the UN objectives.
This article is organized as follows.
Section 2 outlines the background of the relevant topics considered for this study, which are mainly related to financial technologies, social media, innovation (including open innovation and new technologies associated), and SDGs.
Section 3 describes the models of the machine learning techniques applied to our data collection of tweets.
Section 4 presents our findings. A discussion of the results, the conclusion, and future work is presented in the last section.
4. Results
The implementation of the proposed methodology to the Twitter database allowed us to compare and obtain insights on FinTech firms’ discourse, showing perceptions of how they communicate with their clients, and the highlighted topics based on their type of activity, including the terms that they use more frequently.
4.1. Discourse Analysis by Companies
Results from the examination of the discourse by company are shown as follows:
For Kantox, the main topics identified were about currencies, location as Barcelona, work, team, start-ups, and a Brexit reference. In the case of Onyze, they centered the discourse on cryptocurrencies, blockchain, digital, startups, banks, and the financial market. For Fellow Funders, topics reflected investment, projects, platforms and entrepreneurs, opportunities, and crowdfunding. For The Crowd Angel, basic themes were start-ups, investment rounds, venture capital, opportunities, and crowdfunding.
Regarding Ariadnext, the discourse was about digital identity, locations such as Paris Cyber Week and Rennes, CEO, French tech, and innovation. The Eurobits firm referenced in Twitter open banking, innovation, and Spain, and it referred to companies such as IBM and names such as Arturo McDowell. Credimarket discussion included mortgage, lending, and experts. iAhorro communication consisted of mortgage, renting, financial education, lending, and personal finance. Finect speech was about investments, funds, rent, and markets. Housers noted projects, crowdfunding and crowdlending, real estate, investment, and start-ups. Rankia mentioned investment, stock exchange, market, webinar, and Ibex.
Aplazame mainly mentioned financing, e-commerce, marketing, Think Tank, shopping, and employment. Creditea discourse included the football team Rayo Vallecano, Ecofin magazine, and money. Goteo Funding highlighted crowdfunding, projects, campaigns, platforms, match funding, and sustainability. The Lemon Way company mentioned topics such as payment, crowdfunding, marketplace, lemon boost, and innovation. Stripe talked about support, business and service, and PayPal.
Fintonic mentioned applications and expenses, and referred to a name, Lupina Iturriaga. Livetopic mentioned finance, savings, and a name, Antonio Casal, in addition to “WealthTech”, and “InsurTech”. The main topics of Sonect were start-ups, Swiss, finance, and innovation. Docuten Twitter messages were about knowledge, blockchain, electronic account, firm, webinars, and people such as Brais Mendez. Quaderno App discourse was about sales tax, business, Amazon, and e-commerce.
4.2. Discourse Grouped by Activities
According to their activities, three groups of FinTech firms were chosen in relation to the appearance of terms, as percentages, based on the text classification (see
Table 3). To delimitate the study, we selected three of these groups based on a significant incidence of innovation and SDG-related topics. The column “Innovation” refers to all the terms related to keywords such as innovative, open innovation, novel, new, disruptive. The column “SDGs” refers to all the terms related to sustainable goals or any mention of the UN SDGs in general.
The results of the BoW implementation were divided by activities, starting with financial infrastructure, in which the co-occurrences of words mainly referred to CEO (i.e., the acronym of Chief Executive Officer), digital, “RegTech” (i.e., regulation technology), Finnovating hub, and innovation. Following the lending group, three words were emphasized—campaign, financing, and crowdfunding—indicating the importance of the activity in this field. In addition, e-commerce, Rayo, or Rayo Vallecano (a Spanish football team), and documentary were highlighted. Regarding the personal finance field, start-up, app, personal, and CEO were identified as the main co-occurring words, which were followed by Spain, bank, money, success, and founder, which are related to the innovative and entrepreneurial domain.
4.3. Topic Modeling Scrutiny
Topic modeling based on the LDA algorithm was implemented to facilitate the arrangement of the tweets database, after the classification was divided into the three fields with the highest incidence of terms, such as innovation and other related terms, in addition to mentions of the SDGs. The results of this approach are shown as follows:
Financial infrastructure was the result of topic modeling applied to the companies Ariadnext and Eurobits, as shown in
Table 4.
Table 5 shows the results of Aplazame, Creditea, and Goteo Funding, which are grouped in Lending activity.
Regarding the personal finance field, the three companies analyzed were Fintonic, Livetopic, and Sonect, for which results are shown in
Table 6.
The outcomes of the financial infrastructure field (
Table 4) highlighted technologies such as IBM cloud and blockchain, and displayed the events promoted by the FinTech firms, such as French tech, eurobitstech, Finnovating hub, and Paris FinTech forum, and places such as Amsterdam, Rennes, and Spain. In addition, names such as Marc Norlain and Arturo MacDowell are an indication of their presence at these events. The results of the lending field (
Table 5) indicate a focus on campaigns such as crowdfunding initiatives and references to financial, payments, shops, and e-commerce. Moreover, sponsorship linked to a football team—Rayo Vallecano—refers to activities outside the financial domain. The personal finance field (
Table 6) includes references to technology (apps) and companies such as Ualet, Mosabi, Mangolifemx, and Veximx. Additionally, there are allusions to success and freelancers as part of these firms’ field.
5. Discussion
Based on the following discussion, some propositions are compiled to guide the future research on Fintech firms and their public discourse on social media:
Proposition 1. Social media provides a helpful framework to understand Fintech’s public discourse about open innovation and SDGs.
The present study provides an improved comprehension of the interplay of FinTech firms and online social media, focused on Twitter. The analysis showed that this platform could help synthesize, trace, and understand relevant topics discourse. Interactions reveal the growing specter of firms embracing innovation-driven and exploiting dynamic utilities into the FinTech ecosystem, as illustrated in previous works [
64,
65,
66]. This paper also addresses the current research gaps identified by scholars regarding social media, open innovation, and digital business [
22].
Regarding the discourse by companies, except for a small number of companies, awareness about innovation and a more direct mention of the open innovation strategy engaging—and the SDGs—seemingly that is not part of the core conversations on Twitter. This might indicate that the topics are more centered on the company’s interests, based on their field of activity, and the news, actors, and publicity about which they boost their activity, as another communication channel. It is still a challenge for this sector to embrace social related topics, and the focus is related to emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, smart contracts, and machine learning [
37]. Social messages on social media may have more relevance as far as (i) CSR may pay more attention to SDG and (ii) the implementation of the open innovation paradigm could attract interest for sustainable solutions regarding mentions of new technologies and social awareness, from which investors and clients could be part of new “green” projects [
8,
27,
67].
Based on their discourse classified by financial activity showed that financial infrastructure, lending, and personal finance were the fields with the most mentions of terms related to innovation and SDGs (see
Table 3). In contrast, equity finance showed the least activity on Twitter and the smallest number of terms related to this activity. The financial infrastructure group showed a strong focus on open banking and payments. This can be explained by the fact that the social media discourse of FinTech companies, which are in this case start-up organizations, differs from that of large companies, which publish more information in the Twittersphere, including that related to SDGs [
12,
68,
69].
However, it can be deduced that 35% of FinTech companies have little or no activity on Twitter. This can be explained because the potential on Twitter is not sufficiently exploited. Furthermore, the majority are SMEs and start-ups who may not have developed a good communication channel. These results contradict expectations based on theory because social media has been proven to be a good repository for collecting big data from companies [
70,
71,
72], which in turn can provide insights to assess the implementation of SDGs. In addition, the use of social media is a suitable method to make accounting interventions beyond traditional organization-centric reporting, such as GRI standards [
68].
Proposition 2. Twitter is a suitable platform to calibrate algorithms needed to conduct machine learning analysis of FinTech’s information extraction.
As a result of the BoW model grouped by activity, the focus of each group is synthesized as follows: the financial infrastructure group uses more words related to technology and innovation. This view is rather different from that provided by topic modeling, which is explained in the next paragraph. The lending group is focused on campaigns with Spanish football teams to promote financing via crowdfunding. The personal finance group also includes words related to their business model, such as the successful use of apps for personal savings. Therefore, as can be deduced from these topics, the current challenge is to learn how to benefit and exploit even more from social media’s potential for innovation purposes [
64], including social awareness. The relationship between SDGs and crowdfunding in the entrepreneurial financial landscape can be explained due to the importance of capital flows, investment, and redistribution of funds to implement entrepreneurial projects, not only for the incumbent FinTech but also for the client start-ups that use a FinTech platform to obtain funding [
12].
The topic modeling implementation allowed us to identify the most relevant discussion emphasized by each FinTech activity. The financial infrastructure group has a strong focus on open banking and payments. This group pays the greatest attention to innovation and highlights the digital technologies applied in their service offerings, such as blockchain and the cloud. The lending group concentrates on crowdfunding platforms and on a recent campaign undertaken entertainment, possibly to incentivize online sales and commerce. The personal finance group highlights the mobility enabled through FinTech’s savings apps. It also presents an international discourse, involving FinTech companies not only in Europe, but also in Latin America and African regions. This can be explained because FinTech firms usually apply digital technologies that enable outcomes, such as mobile apps (e.g., highly mentioned by the personal finance group) or digital platforms (e.g., highly mentioned by the lending group) [
73]. Haddad and Hornuf [
28] stated that FinTech firms establish new ecosystems or hubs of entrepreneurial activities in specific geographic regions; however, our study shows that social media can be used to establish international FinTech hubs with companies that are not located in different regions, as proven by the personal finance group. Therefore, the decision to locate a FinTech firm is less crucial due to the digitalization and flattening of the financial world.
Proposition 3. FinTech ecosystem in Twitter illustrates the use of open innovation and tech business models.
The references to new types of technologies and actors in a number of tweets indicate that the analyzed FinTech firms may be willing to embrace cooperation (which implies the open innovation implementation) with the visualization of novel business models, if there is constant feedback and consequent follow up from social media, due to the disruptive nature of the financial technology business [
34]. However, limitations of information regarding adopting new open innovation approaches should be confirmed through surveys or interviews directed to managers and CEOs of the firms involved. This final point is outside of the scope of this research.
Proposition 4. Social media serve as a showcase to promote figures, events, and activities implemented by FinTech firms.
The interaction of companies in social media provides a source of public debate and a conversation that could be of interest to monitoring. Assessment of the main topics, as undertaken in this study, can provide a feasible barometer focused on innovation. In addition, the visibility that Twitter provides to those companies immersed in technological and innovative initiatives provides a unique opportunity to understand the value of social media and its role in catalyzing the spread of FinTech innovations [
66].
The promotion of technologies related to innovative finance (e.g., crowdfunding) appears to be part of the natural behavior of spreading new ideas. Thus, these companies are able to significantly influence the activity in their network and inside and outside their areas of action. For this reason, pairing online platforms can also help to promote SDGs and innovation, creating awareness about the sustainable topics’ agenda.
Another important topic related to the FinTech public image is corporate social responsibility and its implication in social activities. As Liu et al. [
74] pointed out, its role is still moderate but promising in the Chinese banking sector. In another context, in the study conducted by Rabbani et al. [
75], they addressed that Islamic finance has solid connections to financial stability and corporate social responsibility based on helping the poor and marginalized with financial technologies. From this perspective, the reputation of FinTechs could be benefited due to the social activities, as the start-ups could promote their community services, as appeared in the recurrent topics based on our analysis, such as those related to sports, crowdfunding activities, innovation, and to a lesser extent, the sustainable goals. In this sense, social responsibility-related topics could give us extra insights to enable new categorizations of sentiment analysis approaches.
A relevant question to be addressed is that the studied companies should be analyzed from other perspectives and not limiting the analysis to the variable Twitter. For example, what are the financial resources or incomes generated by those companies? These new outcomes may also be influenced by company size. The used sample in this work is based on small companies with few employees. However, future works might monitor the evolutions over time of these companies as far; some results may be determined by the growth of companies, as more size may provide a different look to include in SGDs awareness and open innovation once the technical expertise is already gained. In addition to these issues, looking at the companies only by their social media activity could be too limited. Perhaps the bigger the company, the larger its social media activity in absolute terms but not necessarily in relative terms per worker. Therefore, deeper analysis and a better descriptive analysis of the sample are required.
Conclusions and Future Work
Based on their discourse in social media, it can be deduced that FinTech firms are not fully involved in the global awareness of innovation and the SDGs. Innovation is clearly promoted as a topic that could be part of an open innovation strategy, so current and potential clients have additional room to interact, providing new ideas and feedback on innovation through social media. One means of enriching these interactions would be to bring SDGs into the innovation discourse. However, many of these firms neglect the importance of social media, particularly Twitter, for promoting sustainable businesses, start-ups, and high technological new services. The results of this study identify different types of collaboration with external actors and topics related to the open innovation implementation in certain firms and activities. This is reflected in the mention of other companies, technologies, and different types of organizations related to innovation. A good strategy could also be to attract new types of clients and investors using the promotion of sustainable goals and boosting cooperation under the umbrella of the open innovation strategy.
Founded on the current findings, this work contributes to understanding the discourse regarding innovation and the role of the SDGs in FinTech firms’ activity and showed varying approaches to discourse in public information streams. The low usage of Twitter indicates that these powerful media channels could be used more actively, including in campaigns related to financial inclusion, green energies, and new types of novel business. However, it appears that this channel is not properly exploited. Of the 358 firms we examined at the beginning of this study, which were deemed to be significant technology companies, only 65% undertook constant activity using this form of social media. Many of these companies are start-ups in the process of expansion. Despite the relatively low activity noted in these firms—except for the promotion of their services—technology and innovation references were present in messages relating to activities in which they were involved due to their business nature.
This research was based on the use of text mining and algorithm implementation in a specific case study. This area has been less analyzed in social sciences, and the current research thus adds knowledge to the use of quantitative methods in innovation management studies. In addition, it would be valuable to reproduce new mixed methods in other types of firms related to Twitter and other social media databases. This study might contribute to the further development of organization models to generate knowledge for innovation and SDGs, helping firms to evaluate their discourse based on the SMA.
This study is limited only to the conversation that occurs on social media. We focus on the FinTech firms (where the majority included in this analysis are start-ups) within the Twitter environment. The inclusion of other sources such as surveys and interviews and variables such as income, number of employees, and other financial resources could open new avenues for future analysis. Another limitation is the geographical approach, where different means of complementing this research would be to contrast the results among diverse countries or regions. However, our results can be applied to other regions considering that many of the analyzed firms also have a presence in other countries.
The inclusion of other relevant topics such as social responsibility, firms’ reputation, media influence, and bots activity should be considered for new approaches. Another topic could refer to longitudinal studies to assess the impact of social media in entrepreneurial activities related to networking, performance, communication, and engagement, not only for innovation and SDGs’ purposes but also regarding performance measurement for both FinTech firms and the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
In addition, to complement our SMA proposition, future studies could use other analytical tools, such as deep learning, natural language understanding, and other trend topic relationships [
76]. In summary, it would be of interest to examine how the entrepreneurial discourse in innovation and SDGs differs between large and SME companies. It would also be valuable to investigate how social media support the entrepreneurial process from opportunity recognition and business planning to project execution and launch, in the open innovation framework.