From Adoption to Governance: A Bibliometric Review of Digital Payment and FinTech Research

Abstract

The rapid expansion of digital payments has transformed FinTech from a primarily technological innovation into a critical component of contemporary financial infrastructure, with implications for financial inclusion, consumer behaviour, banking transformation, platform competition, cybersecurity, and regulatory governance. Despite the growing volume of scholarship, the intellectual development of digital payment and FinTech research remains fragmented across business, economics and finance, computer science, engineering, decision sciences, and social sciences. This study provides a comprehensive bibliometric review of the field by combining descriptive performance analysis with science-mapping techniques to examine its growth trajectory, disciplinary configuration, geographic distribution, collaborative structure, thematic evolution, and intellectual foundations. The analysis is based on a systematically screened bibliographic corpus derived from major scholarly indexing records and employs publication, co-authorship, keyword co-occurrence, and co-citation indicators to identify both established knowledge structures and emerging research fronts. The findings reveal a rapidly expanding research domain, particularly since 2023, characterised by strong contributions from emerging economies and substantial interdisciplinary interaction between technological and socio-economic research. India emerges as the largest publication hub, followed prominently by Indonesia, while international collaboration remains comparatively regional and fragmented. The thematic structure shows that digital payments, financial inclusion, digital wallets, digital banking, FinTech adoption, and technology acceptance constitute the field’s dominant intellectual core. Co-citation patterns similarly demonstrate substantial dependence on behavioural adoption and innovation-diffusion perspectives. At the same time, newer clusters involving artificial intelligence, blockchain, digital currencies, cybersecurity, sustainable finance, and digital transformation indicate progressive diversification of the research agenda. However, this expansion has not been matched by equivalent theoretical development in areas such as platform governance, interoperability, competition policy, institutional regulation, data governance, and the political economy of digital financial infrastructure. The review therefore identifies a transition from an adoption-centred literature toward an emerging governance-centred research agenda