We perform a large scale analysis of a list of fintech terms in (i) news and blogs in the English language and (ii) professional descriptions of companies operating in many countries. The occurrence and the co-occurrence of fintech terms and locutions show a progressive evolution of the list of fintech terms in a compact and coherent set of terms used worldwide to describe fintech business activities.

By using methods of complex networks that are specifically designed to deal with heterogeneous systems, our analysis of a large set of professional descriptions of companies shows that companies having fintech terms in their description present over-expressions of specific attributes of country, municipality, and economic sector. By using the approach of statistically validated networks, we detect geographical and economic over-expressions of a set of companies related to the multi-industry, geographically, and economically distributed fintech movement.

F. Ciulla, R. Mantegna, Dynamics of fintech terms in news and blogs and specialization of companies of the fintech industry, Chaos 30 (2020) 083112