Microenterprises, Financial Innovation and Green Practices: Qualitative Case Studies from Finland

This chapter is one of the first academic studies to highlight the critical role of FinTech microenterprises in linking financial innovations and sustainability. Based on the qualitative assessment of three Finnish microenterprises, we show that FinTech can develop unique technology-based sustainable (green) offerings to microenterprises. These offerings provide opportunities for other firms to engage with sustainability-conscious consumers, allow consumers to invest in sustainable firms at reasonable rates of return, and remove the need for paper receipts for credit or debit card transactions. Despite the different fields of operation, the case studies show that FinTech offers a unique market opportunity for the case firms to compete with prominent financial service providers and companies in other service sectors, which was not possible earlier. We found that the innovative offerings by these microenterprises create value for a range of stakeholders, including their customers, which sometimes also includes large financial sector players.