Analysing the Evolution of FinTech Research Topics in Academia

The FinTech or financial technology industry has burgeoned in the past decade and has emerged as one of the hottest industries in recent times thanks to a myriad of innovations and disruption. New technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, regulatory technology (RegTech), robotic process automation (RPA), insurance technology (InsurTech), internet of things (IoT), cloud computing and many more have been implemented in various different industries in unprecedented ways thereby disrupting the status quo. KPMG indicates that investment in the FinTech industry has doubled from 2017 to 2018, hitting a record $111.8 billion. Owing to the enormous global investment in the FinTech sector and its rapid expansion, it becomes imperative to analyse the research topics directing the growth of the FinTech sector. This research analyses FinTech research done in the past decade to determine the hot topics and provide an overview of how these topics have changed over time. Abstracts of journals articles and conferences are taken and a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model using Gibbs sampling is trained to extract topics from them using topic modelling. The trends of the extracted topics are also identified including the positive or negative linear trends as well as non-linear trends