Financial Inclusion through Blockchain Based FinTech Innovation: A Bibliometric Analysis of an Emerging Research Field

Abstract

Blockchain-based FinTech innovation means financial services that are digitally enabled and built on distributed ledger infrastructures. These innovations aim to make it easier to deliver financial services and can help with financial inclusion by expanding access to formal financial services, especially for those who are underserved and unserved. Previous bibliometric studies have focused on FinTech or blockchain technologies separately, with limited attention given to their combined role in fostering financial inclusion, thus creating a gap that this study aims to fill. In this paper, a bibliometric review of the scientific literature on the intersection of FinTech, blockchain technologies, and financial inclusion was conducted using the Scopus database. The search query was designed to cover the period starting from 2015, and the findings indicate that the articles explicitly combining such concepts do not start being found until 2017, which results from the gradual integration of these concepts into the academic literature. The analysis was therefore performed on a final corpus of 132 Scopus-indexed documents published between 2017 and 2026, with data collected through Feb. 9, 2026, which is a partial publication year. The paper combines Scopus analytical results of scientific production per year, type of document, source, subject, author and country with science mapping, such as keyword co-occurrence networks, density plots and country collaboration graphs produced in VOSviewer. Findings indicate a significant increase in publication activity since 2021 (90% of the studies published from 2021 to 9 February 2026), which justifies the increased interest of scholars in the topic of FinTech and blockchain-based solutions for financial inclusion. The key and highly interrelated themes found through the keyword co-occurrences analysis include FinTech, blockchain, financial inclusion, and innovation; the emerging research axes include artificial intelligence, sustainable finance, and Islamic finance, which have not been as densely covered. Geographical analysis shows that most of the research output is concentrated in a few countries (India emerges as the top contributor) and emerging economies play a central role, and the spread of publications in several sources and types of documents indicates that the field is interdisciplinary and still evolving. This paper provides a structured review of the history, thematic background, and research gaps related to blockchain-based FinTech innovation for financial inclusion by using Scopus performance indicators with bibliometric mapping, which has given the study a solid reference framework upon which further research can be conducted.

JEL Classification: G23, O33, O16, G21

Paper type: Theoretical Research