To FinTech and Beyond

FinTech is about the introduction of new technologies into the financial sector, and it is now revolutionizing the financial industry. In 2017, when research in this area was not active in the academic community in finance, the editorial team of the Review of Financial Studies decided to launch a competition among scholars to develop research proposals focused on this topic. This special issue is the final outcome of this process. In this introductory article, we describe the recent FinTech phenomenon and the novel editorial protocol employed for this special issue following a Registered Reports format. We discuss what we learned from the submitted proposals about the field of FinTech and what proposals we selected to be completed and ultimately come out in this special issue. We also provide several observations that can hopefully help guide research in the emerging area of FinTech in the future