Abstract
Fintech is a phenomenon that spans the fields – and industry classifications used in company registration databases – of both Finance and Technology. This has resulted in unclear definitions of fintech, where some definitions define fintech in terms of financial services and others define it in terms of technologies. Consequently, studies of fintech and their results may not be directly comparable, and fintech firms are hard to identify using company registration data. This has implications for understanding the phenomenon of fintech, as well as for policymaking and regulatory efforts reliant on these definitions and data. This chapter uses machine learning and Swedish companies’ registry data to identify and define fintech firms, and associated fintech domains. The methodology relies on free text firm description data. It also explores the usefulness and limits of industry classification (SIC) codes in identifying these field-spanning firms, and by extension the boundaries and domains of fintech in a data-driven rather than model-driven understanding of fintech.