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Purpose This paper examines what structural and financial factors determine net working capital levels in listed fintech firms and whether those relationships are uniform across subsectors. Design/methodology/approach We use an unbalanced panel of 172 listed fintech firms across 27 countries drawn from Refinitiv Eikon. Estimation combines a fixed-effects model and a two-step System GMM estimator. Robustness checks cover a balanced panel, a COVID-period exclusion subsector interaction models with joint Wald tests and a non-cash net working capital decomposition. Findings Cash holdings are the dominant predictor in the static models and the association persists across subsectors and regions, though it attenuates in the GMM specification once the lagged dependent variable absorbs shared persistence. Profitability carries a positive significant coefficient that survives instrumentation. Leverage is consistently negative but insignificant in every within-firm estimator, a result consistent with the equity-dominant capital structures of listed fintech firms rather than with conventional debt-substitution predictions. The implied adjustment speed is approximately 60 percent per year. Cross-sector heterogeneity concentrates in the cash channel with financial services showing the largest amplification. Originality This is the first panel-based analysis of working capital determinants in a global, multi-subsector fintech sample. Canonical static associations replicate in this sector with two boundary conditions: the leverage null reflects structural equity dominance and the cash effect concentrates in financial services firms.
Rios-Vazquez et al. (Sat,) studied this question.