Читать книгу The FINTECH Book - Chishti Susanne - Страница 4

We both started off delving into the field of FinTech at roughly the same point in time. Eager to learn more, we quickly discovered that there existed no single, consolidated, and authoritative source on the subject. On a remarkably sunny London day, we met up in a local café, ascertaining our mutual passion for FinTech and our desire to find out more. Typically of entrepreneurs, we decided to fill the currently existing gap in FinTech knowledge and produce a FinTech book ourselves, a book that would provide food for thought to FinTech newbies, pioneers, and well-seasoned experts alike. This is how The FinTech Book was born.

The reader will notice that this is the first “globally crowdsourced” treatment of the subject. The reason we decided to reach out to the global FinTech community in sourcing contributors for the book lies in the inherently fragmented nature of the field of Financial Technology. There was no single author, organization, or indeed region in the world that could exhaustively cover all the facets and nuances of FinTech. What is more, by being able to call upon a truly global contributor base, we not only stayed true to the spirit of FinTech, making use of technological channels of communication in reaching out to, selecting, and reviewing our would-be contributors, we also made sure that every corner of the globe had the chance to have its say. Thus, we aimed to fulfil one of the most important purposes of The FinTech Book, namely to give a voice to those that would remain unheard, those that did not belong to a true FinTech community in their local areas, and spread that voice to an international audience. We have immensely enjoyed the journey of editing The FinTech Book and sincerely hope that you will enjoy the journey of reading it, at least as much.

More than 160 authors from 27 countries submitted 189 abstracts to be part of the book. We asked our global FinTech community for their views regarding which abstracts they would like to have fully expanded for The FinTech Book. From all these potential contributors, we selected 86 authors who have been asked to write full chapters, which have now been included in this book. We conducted a questionnaire among all our selected authors to further understand their background and expertise.

Our selected final authors come from 20 countries. The majority have postgraduate university degrees (60 %) (Figure 1), strong domain expertise across many fields (Figure 2), and 93 % of our finalist authors have had articles published before.

Figure 1 What is the highest educational qualification of our authors?

Figure 2 Areas in which our authors have domain expertise (multiple choices were possible)

Figures 3 and 4 show that almost half our finalist authors are entrepreneurs working for FinTech start-ups (many of them part of the founding team), a quarter come from established financial and technology companies, and another quarter from service providers such as consulting firms or law firms servicing the FinTech sector.

Figure 3 Type of company in which our authors were working

Figure 4 Size of companies for which our authors work

Almost a fifth of our authors work for start-ups with up to five people and another 55 % for start-ups/small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) of up to 100 people. 17 % of our contributors are employed by a large organization of more than 1,000 employees.

In summary, we are very proud of our highly qualified authors, their strong expertise, and passion for FinTech through being either entrepreneurs or often “intrapreneurs” in large established organizations who all are committed to play a significant role in the global FinTech revolution. These remarkable people are willing to share their insights with all of us in these pages.

Firstly, this project would not have been possible without the dedication and efforts of all contributors to The FinTech Book (both those who submitted their initial abstracts for consideration by the global FinTech community, as well as the final authors whose insights you will be reading shortly). In addition, we would like to thank Inna Amesheva, Suki Jutla, and Maya Petersohn for their invaluable help in the final stages of the editing process. Last, but certainly not least, we would like to thank our editors at Wiley whose guidance and help ensured that the project which started off as an idea in a London café has become the book which you are now holding in your hands.

Susanne Chishti and Janos Barberis

The FinTech Book Editors

2016