Potential Impact of Digital Finance on Small Business Lending: the ‘Fx12’ Case Study

Digital innovation technologies are part of the so-called Digital Transformation (DT); also in the financial sector, DT has become an imperative for companies. A branch of DT is the Digital Finance (DF) and in the last decade, DF (also known as FinTech) has become more and more popular. In a nutshell, DF is the Internet-based generation of traditional finance, and it represents a revolution currently taking place in the financial system; at the same time, FinTech has had an impact on both incumbents, with a change of the business models, and on new competitors, i.e., DF Start-ups. In this exploratory research, a case study has been longitudinally investigated, in which the unit of analysis is a finance firm and not a finance project (i.e., adopting an institutional, and not occasional, point of view). More specifically, the top management of FX12 (Naples, Italy) has been contacted, with several interviews over three months; this start-up was founded in 2019, for assisting the financing of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The FX12 case study demonstrates that FinTech companies could also support Small Business Lending (SBL), implicating that FinTech can also play a fundamental role in funding local economic growth. Limits of the research and potential developments are then discussed.