Muğaloğlu, E Ahmet Faruk Aysan
email: aaysan@hbku.edu.qa

Ph.D Ibrahim Musa Unal

In

Aysan, A.F E Akyıldırım

Cepni, O. & Ceyhan Darendeli

H B & Saraç

Rizkiah S K & Salim

Aysan, A. F J A Batten

A Chantziaras

Polat A Y & Tekin

Aysan & Bergigui

F & Kayani

U N Kayani

) Aysan

Güler

Aysan Orman

Is Islamic Finance Evolving Into Fintech and Blockchain: A Bibliometric Analysis

Keywords: Fintech, Islamic, bibliometric, blockchain, cryptocurrency

This paper conducts a bibliometric research in the literature on Fintech and Islamic finance. The data of this study consists of relevant articles obtained from the Scopus database as of February 2021. A keywords bundle related to Islamic finance and keyword has been used for the search, resulting in 89 publishments included in this research. Results show the stunning increase in the Islamic Fintech publishments after 2017, mainly in the fields of cryptocurrencies, micro-finance, impact investing, and SRI investing, and so on. The two main centers of Islamic Fintech research are Malaysia-Indonesia Region and the GCC area. The increasing number of Islamic Fintech publishments show the potential of the field for the industry's future.

Fintech And Blockchain in Islamic Finance: A Bibliometric Analysis

Introduction

The technology boom that humankind experience in the 21 st century affects the financial area significantly as well. Fintech is one of the most trending regions within economic studies worldwide and can be defined as the use of innovative and disruptive technology for providing financial services [START_REF] Rabbani | Fintech, blockchain and Islamic finance: An extensive literature review[END_REF]. Although the term fintech was in use since the early 21 st century, it became more popular in the late 2010s in the research area [START_REF] Haddad | The emergence of the global Fintech market: economic and technological determinants[END_REF].

Increasing global competition in the financial sector triggered a new seeking for cost minimization strategies for financial institutions, and using disruptive technologies has been preferable for this aim. The friction of transaction costs is one of the main challenges within financial services.

Reducing them would significantly help the institutions to gain a competitive advantage, which fintech would provide efficiently [START_REF] Anikina | Methodological Aspects of Prioritization of Financial Tools for Stimulation of Innovative Activities[END_REF].

Another reason for fintech to emerge in the 2010s is, no doubt, the loss of trust in the financial institutions with the sub-prime crisis [START_REF] Abdelsalam | Major shareholders' trust and market risks: Substituting weak institutions with trust[END_REF]. While the recovery from the crisis was ongoing, people started looking for new strategies to establish their investments more trustable and transparently [START_REF] Rabbani | Fintech, blockchain and Islamic finance: An extensive literature review[END_REF]. Therefore, the idea of decentralizing the financial systems and using open-source bookkeeping attracted people (Aysan et al., 2021) 1 , which afterward started the rapid establishment of fintech and blockchain technologies. PWC (2019) estimates that global Fintech investment will exceed USD1.5B in the next 3 to 5 years. Until the Fintech boom, financial institutions were stuck in finding innovative solutions (Aysan et al., 2021). They were in dire need of finding paths to increase efficiency and reduce costs, and fintech opened new horizons for financial institutions in this regard [START_REF] Tornjanski | A Need for Research Focus Shift: Banking Industry in the Age of Digital Disruption[END_REF].

Fintech, as a term first mentioned by Abraham Leo Bettinger in 1972 with the following words: "Fintech can be defined as a contraction which combines bank experience and expertise with information technology" [START_REF] Bettinger | Fintech: A series of 40-time shared models used at manufacturers Hanover trust company[END_REF]. However, the emergence of fintech reaches earlier times. The first action for fintech is the transatlantic cable laying project in 1866, which is also accepted as the starting date for Fintech 1.0 [START_REF] Ahmi | Mapping of Financial Technology (Fintech) Research: A Bibliometric Analysis[END_REF]. Table-1 summarizes the evolution of fintech with four main eras [START_REF] Ahmi | Mapping of Financial Technology (Fintech) Research: A Bibliometric Analysis[END_REF]. The Islamic finance world reasonably welcomes Fintech innovations as well. With some extra challenges, Islamic finance's core competencies are often in line with the innovations that fintech promises. Moreover, technological developments that fintech brings into the finance world can support protecting Islamic finance's salient values such as transparency, ethical business standards, capital, risk-sharing philosophies, etc. The general design of fintech shared capital aligns with Shariah requirements, allowing individuals and institutions to establish risk-sharing mechanisms better. The transparency and ethical business philosophy also can be obtained clearly by the public bookkeeping feature of blockchain technology [START_REF] Gomber | On the Fintech revolution: interpreting the forces of innovation, disruption, and transformation in financial services[END_REF]. Combining these and ore facts with the potential of fintech shows that Islamic finance2 has a more considerable potential than its conventional counterpart in terms of catching up with the Fintech innovations [START_REF] Rabbani | Fintech, blockchain and Islamic finance: An extensive literature review[END_REF].

Moreover, Islamic finance, especially micro-finance institutions, needs to significantly increase their cost-effectiveness, as their profit margins are very narrow. Using fintech helps these organizations make online and instantaneous transactions, thus minimizing the transaction friction in time and money. As these organizations often focus on narrow-income people who live in rural areas, these people's reachability and financial inclusion are other main challenges. The fact that smartphones became very widespread and most banking transactions can be obtained with the mobile branches help these institutions reach more people and enlarge their volume (Aysan et al., 2013). Thus theoretically, they will enjoy the economies-of-scale advantage better. Additionally, the overall benefits of increasing the financial inclusion for an economy would be obtained with these features of Islamic Fintech.

Besides all these advantages, Islamic finance has certain disadvantages for adopting fintech as well. Two main challenges are the lack of trained human force and clear policies from governments [START_REF] Rusydiana | Developing Islamic Financial Technology in Indonesia[END_REF]). An overall ecosystem with organizations, institutions, and regulations would bring a more efficient development for Islamic Fintech and give Islamic finance a better competitive position against its conventional counterpart. Non-Islamic institutions have a size advantage in Fintech investments, and the Islamic finance world needs to find practical and creative solutions for closing this gap. Lastly, the Muslim population is expected to be 3 billion in 2060, and countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom are leading Islamic Fintech around the globe [START_REF] Cooper | The Race to Become the World's Leading Leading Islamic Fintech Hub -Raconteur[END_REF].

Therefore, strong positioning in the Fintech world for Islamic finance is vital from many dimensions. With all negative and positive aspects, Islamic finance gives more attention to fintech, and the increasing number of research papers in the literature proves this interest. Especially after 2010, researchers focus on the areas such as Islamic Fintech, blockchain, and its usage in Islamic financial institutions, micro-finance and fintech, and many more.

The literature has reached a significant volume on these issues. Evaluating the quantity and quality of existing literature would help researchers better understand how Islamic Fintech will move in the future. In this regard, this paper conducts a bibliometric research in the literature on Fintech and Islamic finance.

Although the birth of the term "bibliometric" is often mentioned together with Pritchard (1969), it became very famous in recent times. Bibliometric research classifies and analyses the existing literature in a particular area and helps readers understand the journals, authors, countries, and keywords under the spotlight [START_REF] Ahmi | Bibliometric Analysis of Global Scientific Literature on Web Accessibility‖[END_REF]. Hence, the future direction of research would be more accurately predicted, and therefore, it will be a helpful guide for researchers.

Data & Methodology

The data of this study consists of relevant articles obtained from the Scopus database as of February 2021. Following keyword search is used to limit the scope of the research; (Islamic OR "islamic banking" OR "islamic finance") AND (Fintech OR "financial technology" OR "financial technologies") OR (crypto OR cryptocurrency OR cryptocurrencies OR bitcoin OR blockchain OR "digital currency"), from the title, abstract or keywords of the articles. The research outcome of the field in Scopus started in 2011; therefore, we limit the period to the last ten years.

With this query, 89 papers have occurred for this bibliometric analysis. Selected papers are exported, and the investigation is conducted in Microsoft Excel and VOS viewer (www.vosviewer.com) apps simultaneously.

Bibliometric studies collect all articles about the particular issue and classify them by their aspects such as year, keywords, journal, author, country, and many more. For more consistency, studies are often limited to a specific timespan and database(s). Visualization techniques such as tables, word clouds, co-occurrence and co-existence graphs, and various other matrices help understand the study better [START_REF] Van Eck | VOSviewer manual‖[END_REF]. All these techniques shall be applied to the selected area in the next chapter.

Results and Analysis

As fintech is relatively new, the articles about Islamic Fintech started to take place in the literature roughly in the last ten years. Therefore, we limited this study between 2010 and the present day.

Figure 2 shows the number of publications by year. Islamic Fintech research started trending in 2017-2018, and the interest in this area increases continuously since then. There are four publications in 2021 (until early February), and with this ratio, it is highly expected that 2021 will exceed 2020. Moreover, considering the exponential increase of the conferences, seminars, reports, and many other clusters about Islamic Fintech, especially in the Malaysia-Indonesia region and the GCC area, the interest in Islamic Fintech is expected to grow sharply in the future. Related to the document types, most of the sources of these publications are from journals, followed by books and conference proceedings. There are five books and seven book chapters, completing the number of book sources to 12, and eight conferences related to these publications. Besides the general words used in abstracts, words like "new, risk, impact, asset, model, future, global, SMEs" have high occurrence. This could illustrate that the authors of papers acknowledge the potential of Islamic Fintech as an area; and talk about its future, impact, and risks more. *Some documents are categorized in more than one subject area These papers have 137 citations in total, with an average of 1.5 citations per paper. This ratio is relatively meager comparing to more mature fields. This dataset's h-index is 5, which means that five articles in this database have five or more citations.

Figure 16: Further metrics about the dataset

Further Analysis & Conclusion

This study has been conducted to analyze all kinds of scholarly works related to the Islamic Fintech area. Although fintech is a trendy field in recent years, Islamic Fintech is relatively lagging it. In the last few years, the potential usage area of fintech within the Islamic finance world is understood better, and researchers started to pay more attention. The potential of fintech within cryptocurrencies, micro-finance, impact investing, and SRI investing is promising for Islamic Fintech tools should also be on the table, as new tools could be off-the-lines of the Shariah.

This paper contributes to the current literature by showing the direction of Islamic Finance literature and calls researchers to focus on Islamic Fintech and blockchain studies more in the near future. We believe that our paper contributes by showing the classifications, types, journals, and other details of the Islamic Fintech research and help researchers to contemplate over Islamic Fintech. Lastly, our paper contributes more to understand how Islamic fintech and blockchain technologies would evolve in the future. This is particularly important because it would help to understand the future shape of the Islamic economies.

By their potential, fintech and blockchain technologies should be used more in Islamic Finance, as they are practical tools for ensuring the primary doctrines of Islam and applying Islamic financial, social solutions such as Zakat, Sadaqa, or Waqf management.

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Number of publications by year

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: number of publications by document type

Figure 4 :Figure 5 :

 45 Figure 4: Number of documents by source type

Figure 6 :FigureFigure 8

 68 Figure 6: Author keywords map, colored by year

Figure 8 :

 8 Figure 8: Word cloud of abstract words

Figure 9 :

 9 Figure 9: Word cloud of Title words

Figure 10 :*

 10 Figure 10: Number of publications by area

Figure 12 :

 12 Figure 12: Institutions with the highest number of publications

Figure 13 :

 13 Figure 13: Most cited publications and their authors

Figure 14 :

 14 Figure 14: Authors occurrence map

  Moreover, as a similar research area, taxation, Zakat, and Sadaqa circulation within the Muslim countries based on financial technologies are earning more attention lately.Islamic Fintech hubs within Malaysia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and more countries are publishing reports about the potential of Islamic Fintech. They build a vision and path for the future of this industry to be stronger. However, the regulation part's weakness and the lack of qualified employees leave question marks about the end of the sector. Certifications such as Chartered Fintech Professional (CFtP) by Global Fintech Institution would help increase the qualified employee in Fintech-related fields. More actions by the organizations are required for establishing a full basement for the Islamic Fintech related to its infrastructure, regulations, demand by customers and entrepreneurs. This paper's findings primarily focus on the quick change of the focal areas of Islamic Finance literature. In the last few years, the trending topics have changed to more blockchain and digitalization-based areas, and this has been reflected in this study's bibliometric results. The growing interest in Islamic fintech and blockchain-related literature promises a bright future for researchers in this area. The increasing volume of transactions also signals lawmakers for focusing on the regulatory part immediately, as these fintech companies started to compete with the financial institutions widely. Besides the regulatory discussion, the Shariah-compliance of Islamic

Table 1 :

 1 Evolution of Fintech

Source:

[START_REF] Ahmi | Mapping of Financial Technology (Fintech) Research: A Bibliometric Analysis[END_REF]

For the sample of Islamic finance and banking paper, see the work of Aysan et al. At various years in the references,(Aysan et al. 2017[START_REF] Aysan | Small Business Lending and Credit Risk: Granger Causality Evidence[END_REF]