The Impact Of Digital Transformation In The Financial Services Industry: Insights From An Open Innovation Initiative In Fintech In Greece

Technological innovation combined with entrepreneurial mindset can transform industry structures and incumbent businesses. We focus on the financial services industry, where the phenomenon of FinTech is shaking the established, traditional players and according to many experts is able to totally transform this business sector. A proven method that allows incumbent companies to sense efficiently their business environment and utilize other stakeholders in order to become agile to such changes is the utilization of open innovation. The open innovation mechanism helps incumbent firms to work with a group of talents or entrepreneurial teams or startups to develop applications and new digital busi-ness activities in order to achieve digital transformation. Through an open innovation case study, this paper tries to provide evidence of the benefits and chal-lenges raised by the digital transformation in the well-established sector of financial services. Partici-pating actively as organizers and facilitators of the open innovation initiative helped us obtain expo-sure to incumbent companies and startups at a level of detail required for achieving a deep under-standing on all important aspects when integrating digital technologies with the established way of doing work in the financial sector