This paper studies development directions of Fintech, discusses the influences of regulations through authorities in the development of Fintech SME and if there are disadvantages out of regulation for Fintech SMEs compared to large technology platforms or traditional financial institutions. The necessity of regulation is undisputed. We expand the Digital Finance Cube to structure the task and use existing bibliometric and systematic literature reviews as well as close-to-market sources to answer the above-mentioned questions. Due to lots of different types of Fintech we use different perspective of a business model to explain and anticipate trends, development directions and the influence of regulations in the field of Fintech. We found more structural disadvantages for Fintech SMEs (e.g., accessibility of data) than for large market participants. But also large players have disadvantages (e.g. path dependency) compared with Fintech SMEs. This shows the need of improving regulation (e.g., data privacy, fair competition, fraud prevention).
Wölfle et al. (2026) studied this question.