Industry 4.0 and intellectual capital in the age of FinTech

In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the prevalence of innovation and technology in the financial sector is indisputable. The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of IT investments on intellectual capital, aggregated and decomposed into its components, competitive advantage, and the performance of banks (Tobin?s Q and CAMELS). These forces are further classified in terms of dual banking, bank size, and market position, and any country-based phenomena that might be applicable. Moreover, data is collected from 65 banks in the SAARC region, based on a time span of 11 years, from the years 2008 to 2018, and involving a total of 715 observations. Based on the endogeneity of IT investments, this study uses GMM regression for empirical analysis. The findings elicited from the empirical results demonstrate a positive impact of IT investments on the intellectual capital, and some sub-components. In the case of the impact of IT investments? on competitive advantage, the results are have come out to be diverse in nature. From a theoretical perspective, this paper contributes to the existing literature by presenting a valuable analytical framework for exploring the role of IT investments in a rapidly changing financial sector.