Understanding the digital transformation of financial systems in the era of intelligent technologies

Deeply rooted in human social behavior, finance and its systems are undergoing deep evolution alongside the transformation of human society since the advent of currency and banking systems. Emerging as part of this evolution, FinTech is viewed as the goal of upgrading the financial industry through new generation Information Communication Technology (ICT) products including Blockchain, big data, cloud computing, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). It has the potential to reshape the traditional financial system that has taken shape over a period of hundreds of years and is experiencing radical warfare. In particular, owing to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the traditional off-line operations of financial institutions, digital finance characterized by online provision of financial services is receiving an unprecedented wave of surge and attention. Like many other industries, it has drawn extensive attention from both academia and industry.

Today, finance is not purely an industry which provides a set of services. It is an emerging paradigm that involves more than Java or C++ development. Standing on the shoulders of leading international scholars and implementing the theory-practice coupling approach, a scholarly community focusing on the digital transformation of finance is being built to deeply examine the effects of recent intelligent technologies on finance, understand the unsolved financial questions in the era of intelligent technologies, and contribute to finance through research. Researchers from most disciplines of social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering up to now have conducted research studies on the digital transformation of finance, covering various aspects including but not limited to the understanding of intelligent technologies in finance, system dynamics, market mechanisms, measurement of investments, modeling of assets, and affective investing and behavior.

Although thorough surveys have been conducted focusing on specific research areas, there lacks a comprehensive overview to systematically cover the research advancements in this budding and interdisciplinary field. To fill this gap, an organizational framework is introduced and in-depth reviews are provided for four basic building blocks of the Framework of the Digital Transformation of Finance, i.e., research on the understanding of the digital transformation of finance, research studies on the effect of digital transformation on the financial system, and regulation of risks brought on by intelligent technologies.