Financial Innovation

Financial technology (Fintech) makes a significant contribution to the financial system by reducing costs, providing higher quality services and increasing customer satisfaction. Hence, new studies play an essential role to improve Fintech investments. This study evaluates Fintech-based investments of European banking services with an application of an original methodology that considers interval type-2 (IT2) fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory and IT2 fuzzy TOPSIS models. Empirical findings are controlled for consistency by applying the VIKOR method. Moreover, we conduct a sensitivity analysis by considering six distinct cases. This study contributes to the existing literature by identifying the most important Fintech-based investment alternatives to improve the financial performance of European banks. Our empirical findings illustrate that results are coherent, reliable, and identify “competitive advantage” as the most important factor among Fintech-based determinants. Moreover, “payment and money transferring systems” are the most important Fintech-based investment alternatives. It is recommended that, among Fintech-based investments, European banks should mainly focus on payment and money transferring alternatives to attract the attention of customers and satisfy their expectations. This is also believed to have a positive impact on the ease of bank’ receivable collection. Another important point is that Fintech-based investments in money transferring systems could help to decrease costs.

In recent years, the tendency of the number of financial institutions to include cryptocurrencies in their portfolios has accelerated. Cryptocurrencies are the first pure digital assets to be included by asset managers. Although they have some commonalities with more traditional assets, they have their own separate nature and their behaviour as an asset is still in the process of being understood. It is therefore important to summarise existing research papers and results on cryptocurrency trading, including available trading platforms, trading signals, trading strategy research and risk management. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of cryptocurrency trading research, by covering 146 research papers on various aspects of cryptocurrency trading (e.g., cryptocurrency trading systems, bubble and extreme condition, prediction of volatility and return, crypto-assets portfolio construction and crypto-assets, technical trading and others). This paper also analyses datasets, research trends and distribution among research objects (contents/properties) and technologies, concluding with some promising opportunities that remain open in cryptocurrency trading.

This study examines the predictability of three major cryptocurrencies—bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin—and the profitability of trading strategies devised upon machine learning techniques (e.g., linear models, random forests, and support vector machines). The models are validated in a period characterized by unprecedented turmoil and tested in a period of bear markets, allowing the assessment of whether the predictions are good even when the market direction changes between the validation and test periods. The classification and regression methods use attributes from trading and network activity for the period from August 15, 2015 to March 03, 2019, with the test sample beginning on April 13, 2018. For the test period, five out of 18 individual models have success rates of less than 50%. The trading strategies are built on model assembling. The ensemble assuming that five models produce identical signals (Ensemble 5) achieves the best performance for ethereum and litecoin, with annualized Sharpe ratios of 80.17% and 91.35% and annualized returns (after proportional round-trip trading costs of 0.5%) of 9.62% and 5.73%, respectively. These positive results support the claim that machine learning provides robust techniques for exploring the predictability of cryptocurrencies and for devising profitable trading strategies in these markets, even under adverse market conditions.