A critical review of blockchain applications to banking and finance: a qualitative thematic analysis approach

ABSTRACT

Blockchain technology is a disruptive technology which has revolutionised the conventional business models, traditional business transaction work flows and opening the door to huge opportunities of business value co-creations. Blockchain holds the promise to disrupt various industries and organisations, and one of the most well-known areas is its applications to the banking and finance sector. This qualitative study has analysed state-of-the-art blockchain research and technology in the banking and finance sector. Firstly, we selected and reviewed 76 literature in the banking and finance sector from 2016 to 2020 and provided a critical bibliometric review of existing literature. Secondly, we applied the well-known thematic analysis methodology to systematically identify the hot research topics, five potential business benefits and three types of potential challenges of applying blockchain technology to the banking and finance sector. Finally, we concluded by summarising the limitations of our study and subsequently highlighted future research directions. Despite several studies in other fields, no systematic review has thus far synthesised the research on blockchain application in this field to the best of the authors’ knowledge. Hence, the current study provides a starting point for future research and facilitates the work of both academic scholars and industry practitioners.

KEYWORDS:

• Blockchain
• thematic analysis
• banking and finance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Our research work was partly supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China [grant number CityU 11525716] and the National Social Science Fund of China [grant number 21AZD008].

Notes on contributors

QingQiu Gan

QingQiu Gan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Information System, City University of Hong Kong and School of Management, University of Science & Technology of China. Her research interests are in blockchain and technology commercialisation.

Raymond Yiu Keung Lau

Raymond Yiu Keung Lau is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information Systems at City University of Hong Kong. He has worked at the academia and the ICT industry for over twenty years. He is the author of more than 150 refereed international journals and conference papers. His research work has been published in renowned journals such as MIS Quarterly, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Internet Computing, INFORMS Journal on Computing, Journal of MIS, Decision Support Systems, etc. Dr. Lau served as the guest AE for the special issue "Transformational Issues of Big Data and Analytics in Networked Business" of MISQ and the guest editor for the special issue "Big Data Commerce" of I&M. His research interests include Social Media Analytics, Big Data Stream Analytics, and Information Retrieval. He is a senior member of the IEEE and the ACM, respectively.

Jin Hong

Jin Hong is currently an assistant professor of School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, and a professor of School of Economics, Hefei University of Technology. He mainly focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship management, organizational behavior and human resources management, and regional sustainable development.