PhD Dissertation Proposal by GAO Zhiyuan | How the FinTech Revolution Transforms Business Model? Disclosing Policy Insight from Transaction Data in Financial Technology

The financial technology (fintech) revolutionhas dramatically transformed the financial industry and received a great deal of attention in the IS field. It also generates a large amount of transaction data, which enables business scholars, policy analysts, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations to disclose novel policy insights. This thesis aims to explore meaningful policy insights from transaction data generated from different fintechcompanies. In particular, this essay studies anomalies in payment messaging flows and prosocial behavior in crowdfunding. Essay 1 identifies anomalies and examines the driver of anomalies from the bilateral payment messaging data. Essay 2 examines how monetary incentives affect the funding outcomes of projects on crowdfunding platforms. In the last essay, Zhiyuan plans to examine how the social relationship and matching gift programs affect herding behavior in crowdfunding. In sum, this thesis aims to provide new insights from the fintech revolutionto the academic research community as well as practitioners in the fintech industry.

Zhiyuan Gao is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University. He works in the area of the Information System and Management, under the supervision of Associate Professor Zhiling Guo. Members of his dissertation committee include Associate Professor Dan Ma and Assistant Professor Qian Tang from SIS. He received his bachelor degree in Quantitative Economics and Finance from Xi’an Jiaotong University, in 2014. His current research focuses on the fintech industry, including global payment flows and prosocial crowdfunding.