Understanding FinTech start-ups – a taxonomy of consumer-oriented service offerings

The financial sector is facing radical transformation. Leveraging digital technologies to offer innovative services, FinTech start-ups are emerging in domains such as asset management, lending, or insurance. Despite increasing investments, the FinTech phenomenon is low on theoretical insights. So far, the offerings of FinTech start-ups have been predominantly investigated from a functional perspective. As a functional perspective does not suffice to fully understand the offerings of FinTech start-ups, we propose a taxonomy of non-functional characteristics. Thereby, we restrict our analysis to consumer-oriented FinTech start-ups. Our taxonomy includes 15 dimensions structured along the perspectives interaction, data, and monetization. We demonstrate the applicability of our taxonomy by classifying the offerings of 227 FinTech start-ups and by identifying archetypes via a cluster analysis. Our taxonomy contributes to the descriptive knowledge on FinTech start-ups, enabling researchers and practitioners to analyze the service offerings of FinTech start-up in a structured manner.