New methods of entrepreneurial firm financing: Fintech, crowdfunding and corporate governance implications

in May of 2016, small businesses and start-ups were permitted to sell shares to the general public in the United States on crowdfunding portals. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has defined rules that make equity crowdfunding a legal means by which firms are able to raise seed capital online. The crowdfunding phenomenon is now slowly spreading to other countries. These developments have given rise to a veritable explosion of new research on crowdfunding, financial technology (fintech), and other alternative methods of start-up financing. This work has emerged in a variety of fields that include but are not limited to entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, information systems, law, and strategy. Against that background, this special issue of Corporate Governance: An International Review (CGIR) sought to attract scholarly submissions from a wide variety of disciplinary and methodological approaches to examine the governance causes and consequences of the emerging fintech and crowdfunding arenas.