Best Paper Award - CER Fintech Symposium 2024

Lars Hornuf and Matthias Mattusch received the Best Paper Award at the FinTech Symposium of the Center for Economic Studies (CER) 2024 in Sundsvall, Sweden. Matthias Mattusch gratefully accepted the award and was delighted to receive recognition for the joint paper with Lars Hornuf and to celebrate this remarkable achievement. This scientific prize endowed with 10,000 SEK recognizes their significant contributions to the field.

The paper explores the promise of fintechs to revolutionize the financial world. Hornuf and Mattusch first document firm failure, funding success, and innovation capacity in the opaque fintech startup market. Using a hand-collected dataset of 892 German fintechs founded between 2000 and 2021, which includes detailed founder and company information, they find that founders with a business degree and entrepreneurial experience have a better chance of obtaining funding, while founder teams with science, technology, engineering, or mathematics backgrounds file more patents. Early third-party endorsements and foreign partnerships substantially increases firm survival. Moreover, they obtain the following stylized facts: Fintechs focusing on business-to-business models and which position themselves as technical providers have proven more effective. Fintechs competing in segments traditionally attributed to banks are generally less successful and less innovative. 

You can access the working paper on SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4620025

Matthias Mattusch also presented a paper examining neotrading platforms, focusing on neotraders' behavior towards low nominal prices. The study hypothesized that innovations such as zero-cost commissions and corporate news amplify biases associated with nominal price illusions among traders using platforms like Robinhood. The study found evidence that these innovations have a stronger effect compared to traditional exchanges. Interestingly, the introduction of fractional shares proved to be a transformative innovation that significantly mitigated the previously amplified effects associated with nominal price illusions.

You can access the working paper on SSRN:  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4653328