Abstract

The FinTech phenomenon has recently had a significant impact on the financial sector, opening up new potential for cost-saving measures and providing increasingly sophisticated financial services. On the other hand, FinTech has helped new players—typically technology companies—enter the financial sector and financial intermediation. Financial institutions have started cooperative and merging operations. As a result, to incorporate the new technology created in the market into their business model. This study aims to determine whether banks engaged in a FinTech merger experience improved financial performance. The research hypothesis is tested using an international sample composed of 106 financial intermediaries that implemented FinTech mergers from 2010 to 2018. The methodology employed is the Propensity-Score-Matching (PSM) technique which provides empirical results using a control group of 8,886 financial firms, with a total of 79,974 observations. The results demonstrate how a FinTech merger enhances intermediaries' financial performance. This evidence highlights the strategic value of FinTech fusion in the modern financial system. This study offers important insights for future research on the topic, as it contributes to combining two distinct outfits of literature, FinTech and M&A, into one that has been little addressed in the financial sector.

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