2025/06/05 by Felicia Liu, Benjamin S. Thompson, Jack L. Harris · 1 voice · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · #FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance #Private Equity and Venture Capital #Sharing Economy and Platforms
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/2833115x.2025.2502343
openalex publication_date 2025/06/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
Financial technology (FinTech) is purported to reform finance by expanding avenues of investment while offering a more democratic, inclusive and transparent system of capital. Within this, ‘green FinTech’ emerged as a potential tool to support climate finance, which is currently underfunded and mired by greenwashing controversies. Yet, the geographies, investment dynamics, and sustainability implications of green FinTech remain underexplored. This paper assesses the growing ‘FinTech for Forests’ (FFF) agenda, whereby FinTech platforms use a variety of mechanisms to enable users to contribute to tree planting. Tree planting is a nature-based solution to climate change that can contribute to global forestation and carbon removal targets. Through network and content analysis, we map the distribution of FFF companies, their customer bases, funding flows and planting locations. We highlight the key opportunities of FFF in enhancing inclusivity and democratic choice for everyday consumers to engage in the funding and decision-making of tree planting, but also reveal the limited extent to which FFF has fulfilled these ‘promises’. Our intervention contributes to broader debates about whether and how an emergent digitisation and sustainability agenda reconfigures global financial networks to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene.