Edinburgh Napier University

  The Fintech industry remains broadly un-regulated compared to their banking counterparts; however, Fintech firms are aware that customer trust plays a vital role in defining success and failure within this industry. In this paper, we discuss the measures taken by Fintech firms to establish trust and self-regulate consumer protection methods for their customers. Our research explores the approaches used by Fintech organisations to create and maintain consumer trust in their services and examines the depth of safeguarding and protection provided by these approaches. To achieve this, the literature review was used to derive twelve grading factors across five thematic areas creating a multi-element grading framework for determining Fintech success or failure regarding building consumer confidence. This was then applied to assessing the practices of 16 Fintech firms (divided into four groups) selected using a multiple case studies strategy through secondary data and the results were further benchmarked against a traditional financial institution as our proxy. The majority of Fintech companies are not required by law to follow financial regulatory guidelines; however, our results show that most of the Fintech organisations studied closely align with the guidelines on consumer protection and financial crime prevention. The Fintech firms also adequately report on their compliance to general consumers. This appears to be contradictory to the literature on Fintech, which broadly focuses on the insufficient regulations overseeing financial technologies. Our results show that the best practices in safeguarding and protection measures practised within Fintech operating within the Transfer field are similar to that of traditional financial institutions. In contrast, the most inadequate consumer protection is essentially embedded within Cryptocurrency and Blockchain.