Fintech has become a critical infrastructure for electronic commerce, enabling digital payments, platform transactions, online financial services, and trust-based exchanges. However, innovation and rapid adoption do not necessarily ensure long-term survival. Fintech viability also depends on regulatory legitimacy, organisational capabilities, ecosystem compatibility, and growing demands for trust, resilience, sustainability, and responsible data use. This study therefore shifts attention from fintech adoption to Fintech Survival Drivers (FSD) and asks which drivers experts identify as determinants of fintech survival. Using a multi-round Fuzzy Delphi study, we identify the conditions that enable fintech innovations to become scalable, reliable, and sustainable business models. A heterogeneous panel of 21 European experts from nine fintech ecosystem domains and 13 countries completed the study between 2023 and 2025. The results directly answer the research question by organising the identified FSD into three evolutionary states: a retained core, a context-dependent selection zone, and a contested frontier. The novelty of the research lies in integrating evolutionary selection mechanisms, institutional conditions, and the requirements of human-centric electronic commerce. The three states support this integrated framework: institutional forces explain which drivers acquire legitimacy and viability, while evolutionary dynamics explain how particular configurations are selected, retained, or contested. The study thus shows how FSD combine to support organisational survival and the continuity of digital transactions.
German DelValle-Araluce, Leire San-Jose, J. Retolaza· Electronic Commerce Research· 0 citations
Economic development has generated major gains in productivity, technological capability and material prosperity, while also intensifying ecological pressures, unequal value distribution and the separation of financial performance from social contribution. This conceptual article develops the Meaningful Economy as an integrative framework for redirecting economic activity towards human flourishing, ecological viability and value for stakeholders. It uses a problem-oriented integrative synthesis spanning ecological and institutional economics, the capability approach, the sociology of work, stakeholder theory, humanistic management, financialisation, corporate governance and social accounting. The analysis identifies seven institutional transitions: from indefinite growth to sufficient well-being; from the exploitation of nature to ecological balance; from means to human ends; from financial profit to value for stakeholders; from short-termism to legacy; from meritocracy to inclusive capacity; and from one-dimensional maximisation to balanced governance. Three cross-cutting mechanisms—people-centred work and technology, socially embedded finance and stakeholderoriented social accounting—connect these principles to organisational practice. The framework’s central contribution is a principle of systemic viability grounded in satisficing: institutions should maintain several essential economic, social and ecological conditions rather than maximise a single metric at the expense of the system that sustains it. The Meaningful Economy therefore does not reject markets, firms, technology, finance or profitability; it repositions them as instruments whose legitimacy depends on the quality, distribution and durability of the value they create.
J. Retolaza, Leire San-Jose· Advances in Social Sciences...· 0 citations
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