Innovation Technologies for the Financial Sector: An Integrative

Review of Value Creation, Market Redesign, and Governance

Challenges

Heba Moselhy1,* Fadi Farha2

1 Business Administration Department, Delta Higher Institute for Management and Accounting Information Systems, Egypt

2 The Faculty of Informatics Engineering, Aleppo University, Syria

Received: January 14, 2026 Revised: March 01, 2026 Accepted: May 31, 2026 ⋆ Corresponding author

ABSTRACT

Financial innovation has evolved from the digitization of individual services to the redesign of financial infrastructures,

organisational boundaries and market relationships. This review brings together recent evidence across five key

areas of AI and advanced analytics, blockchain and distributed ledgers, open banking and application programming

interfaces, central bank digital currencies, platform-based finance and digitally enabled sustainable finance. Journal

articles from 2020-2025 that were published in peer-reviewed journals were subjected to a structured integrative

review. The final evidence base consists of 24 studies that were chosen for being topical, clear in terms of

methodology, and published in a scholarly journal. All articles were coded by technology domain, the financial

function, research design, principal value mechanism, and the predominant risk. The synthesis illustrates how the

four foundational mechanisms of innovation—information friction reduction, verification and execution automation,

financial services availability expansion, and programmable or data-portable financial market architectures—can

generate value. But second order risks are also created, including algorithmic opacity, privacy externalities, platform

concentration, cyber dependency, regulatory fragmentation, and new channels of liquidity or systemic stress. While

strong evidence exists for blockchain, digital money and open banking, the organizational studies of generative

AI, embedded finance, PFTs and quantum-ready financial infrastructure are still in their infancy. The Review

builds a governance-based framework on which the financial outcome depends on a combination of technological

capability, institutional design, and market structure. It ends with a research agenda focused upon causal evaluation,

cross-jurisdictional comparison, resilience metrics and human accountability in increasingly autonomous financial

systems.

Keywords: Financial innovation FinTech Artificial intelligence Blockchain Open banking Central bank digital

currency Digital finance RegTech Financial inclusion

1. INTRODUCTION

Financial technology is not being confined to a layer on top

of traditional financial services. It is becoming a significant

factor in the generation, assessment, trading, settlement, monitoring

and regulation of financial claims. In the last 10 years,

cloud computing, mobile platforms, application programming

interfaces (APIs), machine learning, distributed ledgers, and

digital identity systems have shifted from being experimental

uses and moved into the very core of the financial-sector