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
link
https://doi.org/10.54216/FinTech-I.060103