Chapter 1: An Overview of Fintech, Pandemic and the Financial System: Challenges and Opportunities

This volume of International Finance Review offers original research that examines the emerging and ongoing systemic challenges and opportunities in the global financial system. Business corporations are facing unprecedented challenges brought on by the current systemic challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the global supply chain issues it caused, the global inflation, and the reversal of the decade long ultra-expansionary and unconventional monetary policies. Moreover, the breakneck pace of financial sector innovation that incorporates technologies, such as decentralized cryptocurrencies that bypass the central authorities and the continued disruptions introduced by financial innovations (Fintech), pose significant challenges for financial corporations, in particular. The current pandemic poses a great threat to the world economy and the financial system less than a decade after recovering from the Global Financial Crisis and the Eurozone debt crisis. It was exogenous and unpredictable, and its consequences will reshape the financial system architecture around the world. Here, technology plays a crucial role in turning the adversities into opportunities and, at the same time, addresses the traditional weaknesses of the underdeveloped financial systems of developing countries.