This article analyses the green aspects of technologies embedded within the Fintech sector, providing insights into the intersection of financial innovation and environmental sustainability. The technological advancements introduced in the financial sector over the past decades hold considerable potential to facilitate the ecological transition and promote environmental sustainability – a potential that has been widely acknowledge in the literature. However, there is still little research on the green attributes of the technologies underlying the Fintech sector, particularly through the lens of patents, which serve as concrete indicators of technological innovation.
Our findings contribute to the understanding of technology, finance, and sustainability, emphasising the value of patent data in tracking progress and guiding future developments.
Through the use of statistical analyses and the Social Network Analysis techniques, we define a multi-step methodology and a set of new measures that allow us to analyse Fintech technologies, as described by the underlying patents, in the light of the environmental and eco-friendly perspective, as proposed by the WIPO IPC Green Inventory classification. The statistical analysis of the green Fintech patents reveals several notable trends. The relative frequency of patents containing a number of green technology classifications within the complete dataset exhibits an increasing trends, although this has stabilised in recent years.
Furthermore, the data indicate a modest deceleration in the overall growth of this segment, suggesting a potential plateau in the expansion of green-oriented innovations in the Fintech domain.
Our results offer an original perspective on the idea of green, expanding the analysis to encompass the collective behaviour of the Fintech ecosystem of technologies and, eventually, any other industrial sector.