Blockchain Technology Adoption for Disrupting FinTech Functionalities: A Systematic Literature Review for Corporate Management, Supply Chain, Banking Industry, and Stock Markets

Abstract

Blockchain technology (BCT) is regarded as one of the most important and disruptive technologies in Industry 4.0. However, no comprehensive study addresses the contributions of BCT adoption (BCA) on some special business functionalities projected as financial variables like BCA integrity, transparency, etc. Therefore, the primary objective of this study was to close this theoretical gap and determine how BCA has contributed to the four business sectors that were selected since FinTech had the greatest potential in these domains. The PRISMA approach, a systematic literature review model, was used in this work to make sure that the greatest number of studies on the topic were accessed. The PRISMA model’s output helped identify relevant publications, and an analysis of these studies served as the foundation for this paper’s findings. The findings reveal that BCA for companies with a disrupting financial technology (FinTech) attitude can help in securing corporate transaction transparency; offer knowledge, same-data, and information sharing; enhance fidelity, integrity, and trust; improve organizational procedures; and prevent fraud with cyber-hacking protection and fraudulence suspension. Moreover, blockchain’s smart contract utilization feature offers ESG and sustainability functionality. This paper’s novelty is the projection to four business sectors of the three-layer research sequence: (i) financial variables operated as BCA functionalities, (ii) issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities associated with the financial variables, and (iii) implications, theoretical contributions, questions, potentiality, and outlook of BCA/FinTech issues. And the ability of managers or practitioners to reference this sequence and make decisions on BCA matters is considered a key contribution. The proposed methodology provides business practitioners with valuable insights to reevaluate their economic challenges and explore the potential of blockchain technology to address them. This study combined a systematic literature review (SLR) with qualitative analysis as part of a hybrid research approach. Quantitative analysis was carried out on all 835 selected papers in the first step, and qualitative analysis was carried out on the top-cited papers that were screened. The current work highlights the key challenges and opportunities in established blockchain implementations and discusses the outlook potentiality of blockchain technology adoption. This study will be useful to managers, practitioners, researchers, and scholars.

1. Introduction

In Industry 4.0, the global fraud detection and prevention market is expected to grow significantly, driven by the increasing use of digital technologies and the adoption of risk-based authentication and fraud analysis solutions.

No comprehensive study addresses the contributions of blockchain technology (BCT) adoption (BCA) on some critical business functionalities (regarded as financial variables), and this is a research gap in a real problem [1,2,3,4,5]. Addressing BCA’s influence on these financial variables is an important issue for managers and corporates interested in disrupting FinTech functionalities [6,7,8,9].

In this domain, BCA initiatives are increasingly used in different contexts, showing exponential growth [10,11,12]. However, these initiatives are susceptible to different types of fraud, fidelity, and integration issues, leading to distrust and discouraging user investment. For these reasons, it is necessary to integrate financial variables operated as BCA functionalities, with the issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities associated with these financial variables. Moreover, there is a need to correlate BCA contributions to corporate management, ESG and DEI implications, integration questions on BCA implementation, potentiality, and BCA outlook with the BCA/FinTech issues [13,14,15,16] to improve the early detection of transparency issues, fraud, and anomalous behavior in digital transformation initiatives.

Despite the growing interest in BCA, there is a notable gap in the literature regarding its practical application and impact on corporate management, supply chain, banking industry, and stock markets. Many existing studies focus on theoretical frameworks or isolated case studies, lacking a comprehensive analysis of BCA practices, challenges, and potential solutions across various contexts [17,18,19,20]. This paper aims to address this gap by systematically reviewing the literature to provide a holistic understanding of BCA implementation in four critical business application areas (corporate management, supply chain, banking industry, and stock markets).

BCA applications have increased after the COVID-19 pandemic [21,22,23,24], so this study evaluated those works published from 2013 to 2022 and aimed to compile and analyze the primary studies on the subject. This research undertook a comprehensive and systematic analysis to identify the financial variables, issues, and contributions involved in BCA.

The analysis, conducted through a statistical approach, reveals the most significant associations based on bibliometric variables such as the year of publication, and total citations. The PRISMA methodology was employed for this purpose, and this systematic review aimed to consolidate existing knowledge in the BCA/FinTech domain, identify research gaps, and provide valuable insights for further research directions.

Therefore, the primary objective of this study was to close this theoretical gap and determine how BCA has contributed to four key business sectors (corporate management, supply chain, banking industry, and stock markets) that were selected since FinTech had the greatest potential in these domains [25,26,27,28].

This study aimed to investigate how the adoption of blockchain technology in sectors with great FinTech potential [29,30,31] (corporation and supply chain management, banking industry, and stock market investment and trading) is affecting many business functionalities projected as financial variables or BCA functionalities [32,33,34,35,36], including faithfulness, fidelity, transparency, trust, corporate performance, integrity, traceability, loyalty, commitment, privacy, anonymity, and security [37,38,39,40].

The goals of this research was to find, record, and analyze the critical key findings (e.g., data, procedures, benefits, costs, problems, issues, opportunities, and challenges) on how blockchain technology may be adopted for disrupting FinTech functions [41,42,43,44,45], and to investigate its applicability and future outcomes in several important business operations [46,47,48,49,50]. The invention comes with costs and rewards, and there is, always, resistance to change. Thus, the difficulties involved in implementing blockchain technology should not be underestimated [51,52,53,54,55].

A systematic literature review (SLR), and content analysis classification are the literature review tools used in this article, and they can add to the body of knowledge in several ways, as stand-alone, autonomous investigations [56,57,58,59].

In general, SLR and content analysis make three main contributions when they are conducted independently: (i) to present an overview of the state of knowledge and its implication in application areas, methods, or theory; (ii) to assess the issues, problems, and opportunities involved; and (iii) to propose future directions for knowledge advancement in the application domain, methodology, and research [60,61,62,63,64]. Furthermore, meta-analysis helps to integrate accumulated knowledge for solid pieces of evidence and logical arguments (academic reasoning) [65,66,67,68,69].

The study will contribute to the development of a comprehensive BCA/FinTech framework that will highlight the state of blockchain adoption today concerning critical business functions, implementation problems, security issues, and management affairs [70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80].

To our knowledge, this is the first paper that addresses, through an SLR and content analysis classification, how particular key findings on BCA manage and influence significant business, financial, and commercial functions, and tasks.

The scope of the proposed systematic review is to “identify, record, and evaluate for future use when ambitious and willing management decides to proceed with blockchain technology adoption for disrupting FinTech functionalities in corporate management, supply chain, banking industry, and stock markets”, and is described through the search keywords, research question, and eligibility criteria.

Four search keywords were used according to the scope of this review (corporate management, supply chain, banking industry, stock markets, and blockchain technology adoption).

Additionally, the following three review research questions are formulated to comprehend the current uses of blockchain in FinTech sectors and functions.

RQ1.

What are the financial variables (BCA functionalities) of present BCA/FinTech applications and their implications in a particular business sector?

There are costs and benefits associated with innovation and technological advancement, yet resistance to change is constant. It is important to acknowledge the challenges associated with implementing blockchain technology to allow further research. As a result, the subsequent research inquiry is formulated.

RQ2.

What are the issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities associated with financial variables operated as BCA functionalities in a particular business sector?

What lies ahead for the researchers and company is another field of study, aside from its application in corporate operations, hypotheses, propositions, potentialities, and obstacles. As a result, the subsequent research inquiry is developed.

RQ3.

What are the implications, theoretical contributions (hypotheses, propositions, etc.), questions, potentiality, and outlook of BCA/FinTech issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities in a particular business sector?

To address these three research issues, a comprehensive SLR of peer-reviewed articles on the BCA/FinTech discipline was applied in this article.

Finally, explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria, based on the review’s scope were used to search for keywords, and research questions, were used to include and exclude studies (academic articles about BCT practices). Hence, to be included in the review, an article needed to meet all inclusion criteria for eligibility and could not meet any exclusion criteria.

To reach conclusions regarding the review research questions under consideration, a seven-step SLR was used in this study as an independent academic approach (framing the research questions, identifying relevant publications, assessing study quality, summarizing the evidence (see Section 5.1, Section 5.2, Section 5.3 and Section 5.4), interpreting the findings, deriving quantitative assessment (see Section 5.5), considering the effect of BCA on critical financial variables regarded as BCA functionalities (see Section 5.6), and issuing content classification and spatial–temporal evolution statistics (see Section 5.7). Its objectives were to identify, assess, evaluate, and investigate all pertinent literature on BCA/FinTech topics so that corporate management can find these results useful when investigating the possibility of adopting BCT in corporate business.

In this paper, “blockchain technology adoption” and “business sectors” were set as the most important keywords, and “document type” was set as “Article or Proceeding Paper”, and finally, 318 papers were screened in the Web of Science, Scopus, and MDPI open-access databases. In particular, this study used a hybrid research method combining qualitative analysis and systematic literature review (SLR). The first step was to perform quantitative analysis on all 835 selected papers, and the second step was to perform qualitative analysis on the screened highly cited papers (7 papers per application domain area/business sector). Based on the above analysis, this paper proposes a systematic research framework.

This paper has the following contributions. First, the proposed framework organically combines blockchain technology, BCA issues, and business application scenarios. This framework is insightful for business practitioners to rethink the economic problems they face and consider the possibility of using blockchain technology to solve them. Second, several future research topics are proposed in this paper. We believe that these suggestions can direct corporate managers, business practitioners, and blockchain technology experts to work together and make huge differences in business.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows: In Section 2 (Research Background), the literature background for blockchain technology adoption in FinTech sectors and functions and four application domain areas with the greatest FinTech potentiality are presented. In Section 3 (Methodology), the method and the procedures for the BCA/FinTech SLR analysis using a customized PRISMA-adapted protocol are introduced to guide academic content data curation, screening, and analysis.

In Section 4 (Research Strategy for Literature Exhausting), the five literature research techniques used for the proposed SLR are presented. In Section 5 (Results), the SLR is applied, under a customized PRISMA protocol, for academic content selection, screening, extraction, and analysis. In Section 6, a discussion is presented, and finally, in Section 7, the conclusions are presented for contributions, findings, practical applications, implications, limitations, and future directions.

2. Research Background

2.1. Literature Review

One of the most significant and inspiring technologies in Industry 4.0 is blockchain technology (BCT) [1,2,15,22]. It is believed to have the capacity to alter how the economy and business sector operate fundamentally; it presents numerous opportunities for both the expansion of current enterprises and the creation of brand-new ones, as well as significant challenges to established ones [17,18,19,20,32]. This proof is provided by BCT, a revolutionary solution for distributed ledgers that reduces fraud and cyberattacks, facilitates knowledge and same-data sharing among stakeholders, introduces smart contracts, and eliminates brokers, agents, and middlemen [39,52].

Because BCT leverages advanced cryptography to provide secure digital signatures and timestamping, it fosters trust and transparent administration by making it more difficult for unscrupulous actors to falsify or fabricate digital assets or transactions [36]. As a result, participants in the metaverse ecosystem experience increased faithfulness, trust, and confidence [17]. Consequently, corporate blockchain transformation presents a fresh difficulty for management of entrepreneurship [18,19].

Using innovative technologies for financial services is known as financial technology, or FinTech. FinTech is presently utilizing several technologies, including blockchain, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence [28,72]. By providing digital financial services to people worldwide, FinTech has demonstrated its actual potential in conventional financial offers. This study examined how FinTech can be disrupted by blockchain adoption (BCA) [20,21,22,23,24]. BCT is essential to the financial industry because, by employing consensus-based verification, it eventually increases confidence and reduces the need for third-party verification [33,34,35].

In the FinTech domain, BCA affects many business and financial operations, including corporate management, supply chain, banking, and stock markets [6,47]. Prior research has elucidated the benefits, constraints, efficacy, and difficulties associated with utilizing BCT across a range of business, management, and financial operations [1,5,9,10,11,12,25,26,27,28,29].

Nonetheless, given the swift evolution of both BCT and the global business environment, it is imperative to possess a comprehensive understanding of the advancements and uses of BCT within the business and management domain. Furthermore, it is important to recognize and emphasize how BCT may be used to help business organizations create value [32,39].

It is anticipated that management will change how business is conducted by organizing and managing its core tasks, such as banking, operations, marketing, and stock market trading [6,43,47,66]. Value creation is anticipated for all parties involved.

Since the primary goal of BCT is to record and carry out transactions securely and safely, its applicability is sufficiently broad to include most financial domains [9,10,11,12]. Banking, insurance, seed capital, trade finance, and capital markets are among the industries that use technology and smart contracts. Companies and authorities worldwide have also built blockchain platforms for assurance, auditing, and financial reporting [25,26,27,28,29,30,31].

A crucial characteristic of accounting information is its dependability and security. Accountants, auditors, and investors all want to see a company’s accounting data to be trustworthy and dependable. This also affects the financial market since more dependable financial reporting leads to more effective financial markets [9,10,11,12,33,70]. Because the auditor would need to spend less time confirming the accuracy of the accounting information, this is also advantageous to the auditors [11,12,27].

The integration of BCT into financial systems and procedures, or “blockchain adoption for FinTech” (BCA/FinTech), will reduce the likelihood of cyberattacks and financial fraud [7,38]. Because it is tamper-proof, BCT offers excellent security and defense against financial fraud and cyberattacks [40,44].

Additionally, BCT provides a solid basis for intelligent contracts, which have the potential to significantly increase financial efficiency. Smart contracts have the potential to automate transactions and drastically lower their costs; they also have the potential to automate contract implementation and enforcement in addition to transactions [33,67].

To conclude the matter under consideration (i.e., key findings on how FinTech can be disrupted by blockchain adoption), an impartial academic procedure, namely, a seven-step systematic literature review (SLR, [58]), which includes (i) framing the review question, (ii) identifying relevant publications, (iii) assessing the study quality, (iv) summarizing the evidence, and (v) interpreting the findings [59]), seeks to locate and assess all pertinent literature on the subject and to provide data and information for content analysis classification and meta-analysis methods [46,71,72,79].

2.2. BCA/FinTech Application Domain Areas

The main corporate business sectors, as BCA/FinTech application domain areas, disciplines, and functions with the greatest FinTech potentiality, are described in [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18] and summarized as follows:

BCA/FinTech and Corporate Management (CM): In the corporate management sector, BCT technologies find several applications [1,10,11] with significant implications [9,12,19,29]. Operation managers can benefit from using blockchain technology in their day-to-day work in many ways, including faster response times, safe and secure data, correct visibility across nodes, and transparent transactions [23,30,70].

BCA/FinTech and Supply Chain (SC): In the supply chain sector, BCT technologies find many applications [22,45] with important implications [48,49]. Supply chain managers can benefit from using blockchain technology in several ways, including faster response times, transparent transactions, and the trust of supply chain participants [63,71].

BCA/FinTech and the Banking Industry (BI): In the banking industry, blockchain has the potential to improve performance [43,66], speed up payments [50], reduce bank expenses [50,51], and increase the volume of secure financial transactions [20,65]. BCT has many advantages, but there are significant challenges and barriers to its use in the financial and banking industry [17,43,65].

BCA/FinTech and the Stock Markets (SM): In the stock market sector, BCT technologies find considerable applications [31,47] with extraordinary implications [54,61,62].

Therefore, there is an important area of research in the field of BCA/FinTech with exposure to corporate management, supply chain, banking industry, and stock markets. Accordingly, relative key findings (e.g., data, procedures, benefits, costs, problems, issues, opportunities, challenges) must be found and recorded, even as self-judging assumptions, because this will help managers, practitioners, and scholars when they decide to proceed to BCA in corporate management [9,10,11,12,25,26,27,33], supply chain [22,45,71], banking industry [20,51,66], and the stock market sector [31,47].

3. Methodology

Following a hybrid research approach, this study integrated a systematic literature review with qualitative analysis. The first step involves conducting quantitative analysis on all selected papers, while qualitative analysis was performed on the screened top-cited papers.

The flowchart of the proposed methodology is as follows:

SLR (seven most cited papers/sector) → Text analysis of the seven most cited papers → Key findings → Financial variables operated as BCA functionalities (RQ1) → Issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities (RQ2) → Implications, theoretical contributions, questions, potentiality, and outlook (RQ3) → Quantitative analysis → Qualitative analysis → Statistics.

The qualitative analysis and systematic literature review were combined in this study’s hybrid research methodology. Seven papers per application domain area (business sector) were chosen for qualitative analysis after the first 835 selected papers were subjected to quantitative analysis. This study suggests a methodical research approach in light of the aforementioned findings.

Four parameters, as methodology criteria, were established to guarantee that the maximum number of articles about BCA models utilized in the application domain areas (business sectors) would be found [72].

Selection of Methodology (1st methodology criterion). Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) technique to obtain final articles is the first requirement. PRISMA is a systematic literature review process based on evidence that involves four stages: (i) identification, (ii) screening, (iii) eligibility, and (iv) inclusion [59]. Its purpose is to systematically increase the likelihood of discovering the most relevant articles [56,57,58,59].

Selection of Databases (2nd methodology criterion). The second criterion pertains to the databases that were used for the article search. Four databases, namely Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, and MDPI open access archive, were employed for this. While Web of Science contains 22,002 journals, books, and conference proceedings, Scopus covers 42,322 journals, book series, and conference proceedings; the overlap rate of articles between these two databases is 99.11% [73].

Selection of Keywords (3rd methodology criterion). Using the right keywords is the third requirement to view the greatest number of connected articles. The literature search approach used in this study is summed up in the following list of query terms. Notably, a search was conducted with the terms “abstract”, “keywords”, and “article title” [72].

Query terms:

“Corporate Management” OR “Supply Chain” OR “Banking Industry” OR “Stock Markets”

AND

“Blockchain Technology Adoption”

Selection of Majors (4th methodology criterion). Using a multidisciplinary strategy when searching for articles is the fourth criterion that this study employed to assess the route to find papers ready for review. With this method, one may perform a keyword search across all journals across many fields, without being limited to a specific journal or journal category.

The following list presents the range of the studies covered by the SLR. The inclusion and exclusion criteria for selecting articles were determined using keywords to ensure the reliability of the database and results. The time frame for the systematic search procedure was defined as being from 2013 to 2023 to ensure coverage of recently available knowledge concerning blockchain technology adoption and the four business sectors. The Web of Science, Scopus, and MDPI archives were the databases used to identify the most relevant types of articles in the English language published in academic journals [73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80].

The timeframe, data sources, search terms, and databases used in the proposed SLR are as follows:

• Timeframe: 2013–2022;
• Data source: Journal articles and conference papers published in English;
• Search keywords and terms: (“corporate management” OR “supply chain” OR “banking industry” OR “stock markets”) AND (“Blockchain technology adoption”);
• Searched databases: Web of Science, Scopus, and MDPI archives.

To determine whether a paper met the inclusion criteria, the title, abstract, keywords, and content were scanned (see Figure 1) following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 guidelines [59]. The papers irrelevant to the above four questions that guided the proposed SLR were excluded. This process filtered out many papers, resulting in the seven most cited articles.

In bibliometrics, content analysis, and meta-analysis, an update to the guideline was required over the last ten years due to advancements in systematic review methodology and terminology [13,46,56,57,58]. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) 2020 statement, which supersedes the 2009 version, has updated reporting guidelines that account for advancements in the identification, selection, appraisal, and synthesis of literature reviews, bibliographic studies, and meta-analyses [56,57,73,74,75,76].

The purpose of the 27-item PRISMA checklist is to increase systematic review transparency. These include the title, abstract, introduction, methodology, results, discussion, and financing, and they cover every facet of the publication [13,59,79,80]. Since this is the accepted style for reporting systemic reviews, this article complies with PRISMA rules and checklists.

For the proposed SLR, for academic content classification, a customized PRISMA-adapted protocol is introduced to guide academic content data curation, screening, and analysis [56,71,72]. It was designed to help transparency of systematic reviews and refers to the definition of the search databases consulted, the formalization of the research questions, the clarification of the search keywords used (according to the defined research questions), and the inclusion and exclusion criteria followed (according to the defined research questions) [13,77,78].

The proposed SLR framework for four independent SLR studies corresponding to the four application domain areas (business sectors) is presented in Figure 2.

In Step 1, the following four business and financial functions, as BCA/FinTech application domain discipline areas, are defined as the BCA/FinTech disciplines under consideration: Corporate management, Supply chain, Banking industry, and Stock markets.

SLR Subject area: The focus of this literature review is on the BCA for disrupting FinTech discipline, which is projected to the widely accepted BCA/FinTech application domain discipline’s areas with the greatest FinTech potentiality [12,25,26,27].

In Step 2 (2nd methodology criterion), to address the three research questions, the academic search databases Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, and MDPI open access archive, are used to extract and select peer-reviewed articles on the BCA/FinTech disciplines. These search databases are the largest scientific databases of scholarly articles that can provide on-demand bibliographic data or records [56,57,58].

In Step 3 (3rd methodology criterion), the following four search keywords were used according to the defined SLR scope and the application domain areas (sectors) in Step 1: (“corporate management” OR “supply chain” OR “banking industry” OR “stock markets”) AND “Blockchain adoption”.

Search keywords may be developed by reading scholarly documents and subsequently brainstorming with experts. The expanding number of databases, journals, periodicals, automated approaches, and semi-automated procedures that use text mining and machine learning can offer researchers the ability to source new, relevant research and forecast the citations of influential studies. This enables them to determine further relevant articles.

Search period: November 2023–June 2024 is defined as the search period.

Search field: The search field, in “article title, abstract, and keywords” is defined based on self- and literature-justified assumptions (e.g., it is assumed that the focus of relevant documents will be mentioned in the article title, abstract, and/or keywords) [13,58].

Language: English. The English language selection is based on justified self-arguing limitations. The English language is currently the de facto academic lingua franca, with few justifications for using any other language.

In Step 4, the SLR research questions are defined.

In Step 5, the SLR inclusion/exclusion searching criteria are defined according to scope, search keywords, and research questions.

The explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria, based on the review’s scope, search keywords, and research questions, are used to include and exclude studies (academic articles about BCT practices). Hence, an article to be included in the review needs to meet all inclusion criteria for eligibility, and may not meet any exclusion criteria.

The following eligibility (inclusion) criteria were used for the article characteristics:

• Expectation: Best BCA practices have been identified;
• Language: English;
• Years considered (SLR time scope): 2013–2022;
• Publication identity: DOI;
• Outcomes: Disrupting FinTech functionalities.

Respectively, the following exclusion criteria were used:

• Articles about theory rather than practice;
• Non-English articles;
• Articles published before 1 January 2013;
• Non-peer-reviewed articles.

Step 6 highlights the seven most cited studies after SLR projection and academic content filtering with these inclusion/exclusion criteria.

In Step 7, BCA functionality is derived, and six (6) key findings are defined as self-judged assumptions (self-judging assumption: an evidence-based reasoning that is accepted as true or as certain to happen, without scientific proof, with a minimum set of items for inclusion/exclusion searching criteria and reporting in this systematic review) from recorded experiences and good practices [13,74,75,76,77,78]. Following, in Step 8, the key findings (regarded as self-judging assumptions) are projected/cross-referenced to financial variables as BCA functionalities [13].

Finally, in Step 9, the potential issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities are identified to help managers interested in blockchain technology decide whether to adopt BCT (BCA), and in Step 10, the potential BCA implications, theoretical contributions, questions, potentiality, and outlook are considered an advisory to BCA/FinTech-interested managers.

To highlight the top seven cited articles in each of the four business and financial function BCA/FinTech application areas, the report conducts a comprehensive literature review of journal articles, proceedings papers, technical reports, and book chapters according to the six assumptions. The uses, ramifications, difficulties, prospects, and possibilities of BCA for FinTech and corporate management are covered in these articles.

In the proposed SLR, the following six assumptions have been defined, and they are considered as “key findings”:

• Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness.
• Credit corruption problems in BCA/FinTech are considered trust issues in digital transactions (banking industry, stock markets, government, etc.).
• Information sharing problems in BCA/FinTech are considered fidelity issues in markets, investments, and financial services.
• Corporate ESG activities facilitate BCA integrity.
• Corporate DEI initiatives enhance BCA traceability.
• By adopting cryptocurrencies, the BCA/FinTech becomes more efficient, scalable, and durable with anonymity, security, privacy, and transparency functionalities.

Following are the structural elements of the customized PRISMA protocol applied in the systematic bibliographic research and review:

BCA/FinTech application domain: Four BCA/FinTech application domain sectors are categorized.

Search databases consulted (2nd methodology criterion): Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, and MDPI open access archive.

Search keywords (3rd methodology criterion): (“Corporate Management” OR “Supply Chain” OR “Banking Industry” OR “Stock Markets”) AND “Blockchain Technology Adoption”.

Research question formulation: RQ1 (BCA applications), RQ2 (BCA issues, challenges, and opportunities), and RQ3 (BCA potentiality and outlook).

SLR eligibility criteria: Five inclusion and four exclusion criteria.

Key findings: Six key findings as self-judging assumptions.

The current study as depicted in Figure 3 will focus on the applications and value creation of BCA/FinTech in managing the four BCA/FinTech business and financial functions.

4. Research Strategy for Exhausting the Literature—A Multidisciplinary Approach (Fourth Methodology Criterion)

Upon exhausting the literature search the SLR researchers are familiar with all key findings, and recent developments in the field. Unfortunately, there is no way to exhaust all of the literature in general and the four defined search areas in particular.

Therefore, it is important to ensure that everything possible has been done to comprehensively research the topic under consideration. In a simple linear literature search approach, the same articles and books appear even when changing the search terms and techniques.

The literature-exhausting multidisciplinary approach, as the fourth criterion, adopted by this research has as the following objectives: (a) identifying important steps to take before stopping research on the topic, (b) using resources and search tools for comprehensive research on the topic, and (c) obtaining research assistance through library support channels.

Consequently, the proposed multidisciplinary approach uses all of the library search techniques as follows.

4.1. Find Top-Cited Articles in Library Databases

Step 1:

Define the topic/discipline (e.g., corporate management).

Step 2:

Read the top-cited articles (Figure 4).

Step 3:

Several library databases include hyperlinks to the selected top-cited articles. Determine whether the selected citing articles are building off the research established in the defined topic/discipline.

4.2. Define an Article as a Prototype and Find Related Articles

Step 1:

Select a study (e.g., a journal article on supply chains) and define it as the prototype.

Step 2:

Some databases provide a link to “recommended articles”, “similar articles”, and “related articles”. Click on these links to pull up results that may be similar to the prototype study (Figure 5).

4.3. Use Clarivate’s Web of Knowledge

Step 1:

Access the Web of Knowledge from the “Discover Multidisciplinary Content” dialog box (Figure 6).

Step 2:

Find high-impact articles on the specified research topic (corporate management, supply chain, banking industry, and stock markets).

Step 3:

Sign up for a personal account to create search and citation alerts.

Step 4:

Create a marked tabular list of studies in the specified research field/discipline with the (Authors, Title, and Citations) as fields.

4.4. Use of SAGE Navigator

Step 1:

Access SAGE Navigator from the “navigator” dialog box (Figure 7).

Step 2:

Find the “Business and Management” topic; once you have selected a major work of interest from the search results, click on the “Key Readings” tab (Figure 8).

Step 3:

View a list of “recommended readings” from the key literature, including journal papers, proceedings articles, book chapters, etc.

4.5. Get Librarian Assistance for Research Consultations and Recorded Video Research Consultations

Step 1:

Research Consultations: Live, one-to-one sessions with a librarian that provide customized in-depth, high-level research assistance.

Step 2:

Fill out the request forms in detail (Figure 9)

5. Results and Analysis

Through a customized PRISMA-adapted protocol, blockchain applications and their implications in four key business sectors were studied, analyzed, and documented for systematic bibliographic and literature review.

In this study, the SLR was applied with the following aspects (customized PRISMA protocol as the first criterion regarding the selection of methodology) for academic content selection, screening, extraction, and analysis:

Search databases (the second methodology criterion): Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, and MDPI open-access archives were selected based on justified evidence [13,56,57,58].

Subject area: The focus of this literature review and content analysis classification is on the BCA for disrupting the FinTech discipline, as described by the application areas: corporate management, supply chain, banking industry, and stock markets.

Search keywords (the third methodology criterion): (“corporate management” OR “supply chain” OR “banking industry” OR “stock markets”) AND “Blockchain technology adoption”.

Search period: November 2023–June 2024.

Search field: The search field “article title–abstract–keywords” was selected.

Following, the three research questions, presented in Section 1 and discussed in Section 3, are projected into the six BCA/FinTech business and financial functions of Figure 3.

RQ1	What are the financial variables (BCA functionalities) of present BCA/FinTech applications and their implications in a particular business sector?
RQ2	What are the issues and opportunities associated with financial variables operated as BCA functionalities in a particular business sector?
RQ3	What are the implications, theoretical contributions (hypotheses, propositions, etc.), questions, potentiality, and outlook of BCA/FinTech issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities in a particular business sector?

SLR eligibility criteria:

Inclusion criteria

• Expectation: Best BCA practices have been identified
• Language: English
• Years considered (SLR time scope): 2013–2022,
• Publication identity: DOI
• Outcomes: Disrupting FinTech functionalities

Exclusion criteria

• Articles about theory rather than practice
• Non-English articles
• Articles published before 1 January 2013
• Non-peer-reviewed articles

5.1. Corporate Management

To determine the factors that influence the impact of the studies, the bibliographic data for BCA/FinTech and corporate management are collected and the spatial–temporal evolution of the scientific production on this theme is analyzed, through a bibliometric analysis of content available in the main editorial houses (Elsevier, MDPI, IEEE, ACM, and Springer), open-access journal articles and content academic databases (Elsevier/ScienceDirect; IEEE/Xplore, Access; ACM/Digital Library; and Springer/Link, Open), citation index databases (Web of Science, Scopus, and DOAJ), and the freely accessible Web search engine Google Scholar.

From November 2023 to June 2024, 225 papers were initially considered (SLR selection journal articles from the search databases (see customized PRISMA protocol) and with a time period scope of 2013–2022. Of these 225 papers, 95 were screened (SLR screening studies) [1,2,8,12,14,15,16,17,18,19,31,32,35,37,38,39,40,41,42,44,52,55,60,67,69,70,72,74,77,78,81,82,83,84,85,86,87,88,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98,99,100,101,102,103,104,105,106,107,108,109,110,111,112,113,114,115,116,117,118,119,120,121,122,123,124,125,126,127,128,129,130,131,132,133,134,135,136,137,138,139,140,141,142,143,144,145], and the seven most cited articles were finally selected (see Figure 1) and presented in

Table 1. The seven most cited articles on BCA/FinTech and corporate management.

Author(s), Countries	Article Title	Journal, Year (Citation)	Key Findings
Christidis and Devetsikiotis, USA [15]	“Blockchains and Smart Contracts for the Internet of Things.”	IEEE/Access, 2016 (5322) *	Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness.
Zheng et al., China [16]	“An Overview of Blockchain Technology: Architecture, Consensus, and Future Trends.”	IEEE/International Congress o.n Big Data, 2017 (5130) *	Corporate ESG activities facilitate BCA integrity.
Khan and Salah, Asia/Pakistan, and United Arab Emirates [41]	“IoT security: Review, blockchain solutions, and open challenges.”	Elsevier/Future Generation Computer Systems, 2018 (2767) *	Credit corruption problems in BCA/FinTech are considered trust issues in digital transactions (banking industry, stock markets, government, etc.).
Luu et al., Asia/Singapore [40]	“Making Smart Contracts Smarter.”	ACM/CCS ’16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2016 (2451) *	Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness.
Agbo et al., Canada [42]	“Blockchain Technology in Healthcare: A Systematic Review.”	MDPI/Healthcare, 2019 (1013) *	Corporate DEI initiatives enhance BCA traceability.
Eyal and Sirer, USA [37]	“Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable.”	Cornell University/Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 8437, Springer, 2014 (2980) *	By adopting cryptocurrencies the BCA/FinTech become more efficient, scalable, and durable with anonymity, security, privacy, and transparency functionalities.
Zheng et al., China [18]	Blockchain challenges and opportunities: a survey	Interscience Publishers/International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 2018 (4545) *	Corporate ESG activities facilitate BCA integrity.

* Accessed on 13 June 2024 (Google Scholar)/compiled by the authors.

[15,16,18,37,40,41,42]. The spatial–temporal evolution analysis showed an incremental linear temporal evolution of increased citations from 2014 to 2019 that concentrated geographically in the USA (28.57%), China (28.57%), Asia (28.57%), and Canada (14.29%) (Table 1).

Following is the list of the compatible key findings, after the text analysis [15,16,18,37,40,41,42] of the seven most cited articles on BCA/FinTech and corporate management:

• [Key finding #1] Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness.
• [Key finding #2] Corporate ESG activities facilitate BCA integrity.
• [Key finding #3] Credit corruption problems in BCA/FinTech are considered trust issues in digital transactions.
• [Key finding #4] Corporate DEI initiatives enhance BCA traceability and accountability.
• [Key finding #5] By adopting cryptocurrencies the BCA/FinTech become more efficient, scalable, and durable with anonymity, security, privacy, and transparency functionalities.

From these five key findings, the following six (6) financial variables (RQ1), operated as BCA functionalities for corporate management, are produced according to the literature [16,18,19,23,29,30,33,70]: loyalty (from key findings #1, and #5), commitment (from key findings #1, and #5), faithfulness (from key findings #1, and #5), integrity (from key finding #2), trust (from key finding #3), and traceability–accountability (from key findings #4, and #5).

Additionally, from these six (6) financial variables, the following four (4) issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities (RQ2) are produced according to the literature [25,26,27,37,42]: security risks (from loyalty, commitment, faithfulness, and trust), skill gaps (from integrity, and traceability–accountability), integration-related issues with other company’s units (from integrity), and performance-related limitations (from integrity and traceability–accountability).

Finally, from the above four (4) issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities, the following five (5) implications, theoretical contributions, questions, potentiality, and outlooks (RQ3) are produced according to the literature [10,15,30,37,40]: how to protect data subjects against data harm (from security risks and skill gaps), governance and internal control (from security risks and integration-related issues with another company’s units), auditability (from skill gaps), direct peer-to-peer transactions via cryptocurrencies eliminating middlemen and reducing transaction time (from skill gaps, performance-related limitations), and scalability (from performance-related limitations).

5.2. Supply Chain

To determine the factors that influence the impact of the studies, the bibliographic data for BCA/FinTech and supply chain are collected and the spatial–temporal evolution of the scientific production on this theme is analyzed, through a bibliometric analysis of content available in the main editorial houses (Elsevier, MDPI, IEEE, ACM, and Springer), open-access journal articles and content academic databases (Elsevier/ScienceDirect; IEEE/Xplore, Access; ACM/Digital Library; and Springer/Link, Open), citation index databases (Web of Science, Scopus, and DOAJ), and the freely accessible Web search engine Google Scholar.

From November 2023 to June 2024, 302 papers were initially considered (SLR selection journal articles from the search databases (see customized PRISMA protocol) and with a time period scope of 2013–2022. Of these 302 articles, 104 were screened (SLR screening studies) [16,22,32,39,40,41,42,44,45,48,70,77,80,81,84,85,86,89,95,96,97,98,99,100,101,102,106,107,108,109,114,115,116,117,118,119,120,126,128,130,132,133,135,136,137,140,143,144,146,147,148,149,150,151,152,153,154,155,156,157,158,159,160,161,162,163,164,165,166,167,168,169,170,171,172,173,174,175,176,177,178,179,180,181,182,183,184,185,186,187,188,189,190,191,192,193,194,195,196,197,198,199,200,201], and seven, the most cited articles, were finally selected (see Figure 1) and are presented in

Table 2. The seven most cited articles on BCA/FinTech and supply chain.

Author(s), Countries	Article’s Title	Journal, Year	Key Findings
Khan and Salah, Asia/Pakistan, and United Arab Emirates [41]	“IoT security: Review, blockchain solutions, and open challenges.”	Elsevier/Future Generation Computer Systems, 2018 (2767) *	Corporate ESG activities facilitate BCA integrity.
Luu et al., Asia/Singapore [40]	“Making Smart Contracts Smarter.”	ACM/CCS ’16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2016 (2451) *	Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness.
Agbo et al., Canada [42]	“Blockchain Technology in Healthcare: A Systematic Review.”	MDPI/Healthcare, 2019 (1013) *	Corporate ESG activities facilitate BCA integrity, and Corporate DEI initiatives enhance BCA traceability.
Alcarria et al., Europe/Spain [44]	“A Blockchain-Based Authorization System for Trustworthy Resource Monitoring and Trading in Smart Communities.”	MDPI/Sensors, 2018 (186) *	Credit corruption problems in BCA/FinTech are considered trust issues in digital transactions (banking industry, stock markets, government, etc.).
Zheng et al., USA [16]	“An Overview of Blockchain Technology: Architecture, Consensus, and Future Trends.”	IEEE/International Congress on Big Data, 2017 (5130) *	Corporate DEI initiatives enhance BCA traceability.
Azzi et al., Asia/Lebanon [45]	“The power of a blockchain-based supply chain.”	Elsevier/Computers and Industrial Engineering, 2019 (595) *	Information sharing problems in BCA/FinTech are considered fidelity issues in markets, investments, and financial services.
Yli-Huumo et al., USA [39]	“Where Is Current Research on Blockchain Technology?—A Systematic Review.”	PLoS ONE 2016 (2916) *	Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness.

* Accessed on 13 June 2024 (Google Scholar)/compiled by the authors.

[16,39,40,41,42,44,45]. The spatial–temporal evolution analysis showed an incremental non-linear temporal evolution citing from 2016 to 2019 that concentrated geographically in Asia (42.85), the USA (28.57%), Europe (14.29%), and Canada (14.29%) (Table 2).

Following is the list of the compatible key findings after the text analysis [16,39,40,41,42,44,45] of the seven most cited articles on BCA/FinTech and supply chain:

• [Key finding #1] Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness.
• [Key finding #2] Corporate ESG activities facilitate BCA integrity.
• [Key finding #3] Credit corruption problems in BCA/FinTech are considered trust issues in digital transactions (banking industry, stock markets, government, etc.).
• [Key finding #4] Corporate DEI initiatives enhance BCA traceability and accountability.
• [Key finding #6] Information-sharing problems in BCA/FinTech are considered fidelity issues in markets, investments, and financial services.

From these five key findings, the following five (5) financial variables (RQ1), operated as BCA functionalities for the supply chain, are produced according to the literature [16,22,39,40,45,48,49]: loyalty (from key finding #1), commitment (from key finding #1), faithfulness (from key finding #1), traceability–accountability (from key finding #2 and #4), and fidelity (from key findings #3, #4, and #6).

Additionally, from these five (5) financial variables, the following four (4) issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities (RQ2) are produced according to the literature [22,41,42,48,63,71]: security risks (from loyalty, commitment, faithfulness, and fidelity), the transfer and storage of highly sensitive data (from fidelity), high cost of implementation (from traceability–accountability), and enhanced sustainability efforts by improving tracking and verifying emissions (from traceability–accountability).

Finally, from the above four (4) issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities, the following four (4) implications, theoretical contributions, questions, potentiality, and outlooks (RQ3) are produced according to the literature [40,42,45,63,71]: data privacy (from security risks and the transfer and storage of highly sensitive data), harmonizing the innovation BCT spirit with pragmatic needs of financial governance (from high implementation cost), trust among users (from the transfer and storage of highly sensitive data and security risks), and decentralization (from high implementation costs and enhanced sustainability efforts by improving tracking and verifying emissions).

5.3. Banking Industry

To determine the factors that influence the impact of the studies, the bibliographic data for BCA/FinTech and the banking industry are collected and the spatial–temporal evolution of the scientific production on this theme is analyzed, through a bibliometric analysis of content available in the main editorial houses (Elsevier, MDPI, IEEE, ACM, and Springer), open-access journal articles and content academic databases (Elsevier/ScienceDirect; IEEE/Xplore, Access; ACM/Digital Library; and Springer/Link, Open), citation index databases (Web of Science, Scopus, and DOAJ), and the freely accessible Web search engine Google Scholar.

From November 2023 to June 2024, 252 papers were initially considered (SLR-selected journal articles from the search databases (see customized PRISMA protocol) and with a time period scope of 2013–2022. Of these 252 articles, 77 were screened (SLR screening studies) [17,20,39,41,42,43,44,50,51,65,66,86,101,106,107,108,112,117,118,119,120,121,122,123,125,130,132,133,136,137,138,139,141,143,144,202,203,204,205,206,207,208,209,210,211,212,213,214,215,216,217,218,219,220,221,222,223,224,225,226,227,228,229,230,231,232,233,234,235,236,237,238,239,240,241,242,243], and seven, the most cited articles, were finally selected (see Figure 1) and are presented in

Table 3. The seven most cited articles on BCA/FinTech and the banking industry.

Author(s), Countries	Article’s Title	Journal, Year	Key Findings
Guo and Liang, China [50]	“Blockchain application and outlook in the banking industry.”	Springer/Financial Innovation, 2016 (1234) *	By adopting cryptocurrencies the BCA/FinTech become more efficient, scalable, and durable with anonymity, security, privacy, and transparency functionalities.
Khan and Salah, Asia/Pakistan, and United Arab Emirates [41]	“IoT security: Review, blockchain solutions, and open challenges.”	Elsevier/Future Generation Computer Systems, 2018 (2767) *	By adopting cryptocurrencies the BCA/FinTech become more efficient, scalable, and durable with anonymity, security, privacy, and transparency functionalities.
Alcarria et al., Europe/Spain [44]	“A Blockchain-Based Authorization System for Trustworthy Resource Monitoring and Trading in Smart Communities.”	MDPI/Sensors, 2018 (186) *	Credit corruption problems in BCA/FinTech are considered trust issues in digital transactions (banking industry, stock markets, government, etc.).
Renduchintala et al., USA, Asia/Qatar, and India [17]	“A Survey of Blockchain Applications in the FinTech Sector.”	Elsevier/Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 2022 (102) *	Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness.
Yli-Huumo et al., USA [39]	“Where Is Current Research on Blockchain Technology?—A Systematic Review.”	PLoS ONE 2016 (2916) *	Information sharing problems in BCA/FinTech are considered fidelity issues in markets, investments, and financial services.
Jena, Asia/India [43]	“Examining the Factors Affecting the Adoption of Blockchain Technology in the Banking Sector: An Extended UTAUT Model.”	MDPI/International Journal of Financial Studies, 2022 (109) *	Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness.
Agbo et al., Canada [42]	“Blockchain Technology in Healthcare: A Systematic Review.”	MDPI/Healthcare, 2019 (1013) *	Information sharing problems in BCA/FinTech are considered fidelity issues in markets, investments, and financial services.

* Accessed on 13 June 2024 (Google Scholar)/compiled by the authors.

[17,39,41,42,43,44,50]. The spatial–temporal evolution analysis showed a stable temporal evolution of increasing citations from 2016 to 2022 that concentrated geographically in Asia (42.84%), the USA (14.29%), Europe (14.29%), China (14.29%), and Canada (14.29%) (Table 3).

Following is the list of the compatible key findings, after text analysis [17,39,41,42,43,44,50] of the seven most cited articles on BCA/FinTech and the banking industry:

• [Key finding #1] Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness.
• [Key finding #3] Credit corruption problems in BCA/FinTech are considered trust issues in digital transactions (banking industry, stock markets, government, etc.).
• [Key finding #5] By adopting cryptocurrencies the BCA/FinTech become more efficient, scalable, and durable with anonymity, security, privacy, and transparency functionalities.
• [Key finding #6] Information sharing problems in BCA/FinTech are considered fidelity issues in markets, investments, and financial services.

From these four key findings, the following five (5) financial variables (RQ1), operated as BCA functionalities for the banking industry, are produced according to the literature [20,39,41,43,50,66]: transparency (from key findings #1 and #5), (efficient, scalable, and durable) performance (from key finding #5), anonymity (from key findings #5 and #6), security (from key finding #3), and privacy (from key findings #1, #5, and #6).

Additionally, from these five (5) financial variables, the following five (5) issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities (RQ2) are produced according to the literature [17,20,41,42,43,50,51]: performance-related limitations (from performance), skill gaps (from performance and anonymity), security risks (from security and privacy), enhanced sustainability efforts by improving tracking and verifying emissions (from performance), and the transfer and storage of highly sensitive data (from anonymity and transparency).

Finally, from the above five (5) issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities, the following three (3) implications, theoretical contributions, questions, potentiality, and outlooks (RQ3) are produced according to the literature [20,39,41,42,51,66]: capital-intensive investments deter most companies from adopting BCT (from performance-related limitations and skill gaps), holding companies accountable for their sustainability claims (from the transfer and storage of highly sensitive data and security risks), and track carbon balances and other environmental metrics (from enhanced sustainability efforts by improving tracking and verifying emissions).

5.4. Stock Markets

To determine the factors that influence the impact of the studies, the bibliographic data for BCA/FinTech and the stock markets are collected and the spatial–temporal evolution of the scientific production on this theme is analyzed, through a bibliometric analysis of content available in the main editorial houses (Elsevier, MDPI, IEEE, ACM, and Springer), open-access journal articles and content academic databases (Elsevier/ScienceDirect; IEEE/Xplore, Access; ACM/Digital Library; and Springer/Link, Open), citation index databases (Web of Science, Scopus, and DOAJ), and the freely accessible Web search engine Google Scholar.

From November 2023 to June 2024, 96 papers were initially considered (SLR-selected journal articles from the search databases (see customized PRISMA protocol) and with a time period scope of 2013–2022. Of these 96 articles, 42 were screened (SLR screening studies) [18,31,39,40,41,47,51,52,60,61,62,67,91,93,100,101,106,108,112,117,118,119,122,123,124,130,133,136,137,140,141,143,144,145,244,245,246,247,248,249,250,251], and seven, the most cited articles, were finally selected (see Figure 1) and are presented in

Table 4. The seven most cited articles on BCA/FinTech and the stock markets.

Author(s), Countries	Article’s Title	Journal, Year	Key Findings
Yli-Huumo et al., USA [39]	“Where Is Current Research on Blockchain Technology?—A Systematic Review.”	PLoS ONE 2016 (2916) *	Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness.
Zheng et al., China [18]	“Blockchain challenges and opportunities: a survey.”	Interscience Publishers/International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 2018 (4545) *	Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness.
Chiu and Koeppl, Canada [51]	“Blockchain-based settlement for asset trading.”	Bank of Canada/Working Paper, Ottawa, 2018 (299) *	Credit corruption problems in BCA/FinTech are considered trust issues in digital transactions (banking industry, stock markets, government, etc.).
Gervais, et al., Europe/Switzerland, and Germany [52]	“On the Security and Performance of Proof of Work Blockchains.”	ACM/CCS ’16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2016 (1961) *	By adopting cryptocurrencies the BCA/FinTech become more efficient, scalable, and durable with anonymity, security, privacy, and transparency functionalities.
Zyskind et al., USA, and Asia/Israel [67]	“Decentralizing Privacy: Using Blockchain to Protect Personal Data.”	IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops, 2015 (3066) *	Credit corruption problems in BCA/FinTech are considered trust issues in digital transactions (banking industry, stock markets, government, etc.).
Khan and Salah, Asia/Pakistan, and United Arab Emirates [41]	“IoT security: Review, blockchain solutions, and open challenges.”	Elsevier/Future Generation Computer Systems, 2018 (2767) *	Information sharing problems in BCA/FinTech are considered fidelity issues in markets, investments, and financial services.
Luu et al., Asia/Singapore [40]	“Making Smart Contracts Smarter.”	ACM/CCS ’16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2016 (2451) *	Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness.

* Accessed on 13 June 2024 (Google Scholar)/compiled by the authors.

[18,39,40,41,51,52,67]. The spatial–temporal evolution analysis showed an incremental linear temporal evolution of increasing citations from 2015 to 2018 that concentrated geographically in Asia (35.70%), the USA (21.43%), Canada (14.29%), Europe (14.29%), and China (14.29%) (Table 5).

Following is the list of the compatible key findings, after the text analysis [18,39,40,41,51,52,67] of the seven most cited articles on BCA/FinTech and the stock markets:

• [Key finding #1] Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness.
• [Key finding #3] Credit corruption problems in BCA/FinTech are considered trust issues in digital transactions (stock markets, etc.).
• [Key finding #5] By adopting cryptocurrencies the BCA/FinTech become more efficient, scalable, and durable with anonymity, security, privacy, and transparency functionalities.
• [Key finding #6] Information sharing problems in BCA/FinTech are considered fidelity issues in markets, investments, and financial services.

From these four key findings, the following four (4) financial variables (RQ1), operated as BCA functionalities for the stock markets, are produced according to the literature [18,31,39,47,61]: commitment (from key findings #1 and #5), faithfulness (from key finding #1), trust (from key findings #3 and #5), and fidelity (from key finding #6).

Additionally, from these four (4) financial variables, the following four (4) issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities (RQ2) are produced according to the literature [18,31,54,61,62,67]: security risks (from commitment, faithfulness, trust, and fidelity), the transfer and storage of highly sensitive data (from trust and fidelity), integration-related issues with another company’s units (from commitment and trust), and performance-related limitations (from commitment and trust).

Finally, from the above four (4) issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities, the following three (3) implications, theoretical contributions, questions, potentiality, and outlooks (RQ3) are produced according to the literature [31,40,41,47,51,52,54]: how to protect data subjects against data harm (from integration-related issues with another company’s units), data privacy (from security risks and the transfer and storage of highly sensitive data), and direct peer-to-peer transactions via cryptocurrencies eliminating middlemen and reducing transaction time (from performance-related limitations).

5.5. Derived Quantitative Assessment

The objective establishment of a quantitative estimate of frequently examined correlations in the literature enables content analysis classification [56,57,58,59]. Usually, this kind of analysis is used in systematic literature reviews that aim to reconcile a wide range of correlations [13,46,71,72]. Conflicting evidence frequently makes up the correlations that have been established (e.g., a positive or significant effect in one study, but a negative or insignificant effect in another study).

Additionally, researchers can pinpoint probable causes of the conflict (such as settings or sociodemographic data) through the use of meta-analysis [58]. Through meta-analysis, researchers can unbiasedly develop a quantitative evaluation of commonly explored relationships in the literature.

Table 5 presents in a tabular form the derivative quantitative information, as integrating accumulated knowledge, extracted from Table 1, Table 2, Table 3 and Table 4, in which content was structured based on self-judging and self-arguing criteria.

Table 5. The corporate BCA/FinTech six key findings (assumptions) and the four selected business/financial functions: derivative information for quantitative assessment.

Bibliographic Research for Corporate BCA for Disrupting FinTech Functionalities (BCA/FinTech Assumptions)		Corporate Business and Financial Functions (BCA/FinTech Application Domain)
Key Findings	Key Findings (Assumptions)	Corporate Management	Supply Chain	Banking Industry	Stock Markets
#1	Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness.	√	√	√	√
#2	Corporate ESG activities facilitate BCA integrity.	√	√
#3	Credit corruption problems in BCA/FinTech are considered trust issues in digital transactions (banking industry, stock markets, government, etc.).	√	√	√	√
#4	Corporate DEI initiatives enhance BCA traceability.	√	√
#5	By adopting cryptocurrencies the BCA/FinTech become more efficient, scalable, and durable with anonymity, security, privacy, and transparency functionalities.	√		√	√
#6	Information sharing problems in BCA/FinTech are considered fidelity issues in markets, investments, and financial services.		√	√	√

Table 5. The corporate BCA/FinTech six key findings (assumptions) and the four selected business/financial functions: derivative information for quantitative assessment.

Bibliographic Research for Corporate BCA for Disrupting FinTech Functionalities (BCA/FinTech Assumptions)		Corporate Business and Financial Functions (BCA/FinTech Application Domain)
Key Findings	Key Findings (Assumptions)	Corporate Management	Supply Chain	Banking Industry	Stock Markets
#1	Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness.	√	√	√	√
#2	Corporate ESG activities facilitate BCA integrity.	√	√
#3	Credit corruption problems in BCA/FinTech are considered trust issues in digital transactions (banking industry, stock markets, government, etc.).	√	√	√	√
#4	Corporate DEI initiatives enhance BCA traceability.	√	√
#5	By adopting cryptocurrencies the BCA/FinTech become more efficient, scalable, and durable with anonymity, security, privacy, and transparency functionalities.	√		√	√
#6	Information sharing problems in BCA/FinTech are considered fidelity issues in markets, investments, and financial services.		√	√	√

Although the data from Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, Table 4 and Table 5 were produced from self-judging inclusion and exclusion criteria and the self-arguing six assumptions (key findings), an SLR method should provide solid pieces of evidence for logical arguments.

5.6. BCA Effect on Critical Financial Variables

In analyzing the SLR derivative information from Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, Table 4 and Table 5, the proposed sequence “BCA functionalities → Issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities → Implications, theoretical contributions, questions, potentiality, and outlook” is documented as integrated accumulated knowledge in tabular (

Table 6. SLR screening: Search keywords mentioned (SLR data accessed on 13 June 2024 from Google Scholar/compiled by the authors).

SLR Search Keyword (Screening Phase)	Count
Corporate Management (CM)	95
Supply Chain (SC)	104
Banking Industry (BI)	77
Stock Markets (SM)	42
Blockchain Technology Adoption (BCA)	318

,

Table 7. The effect of BCA on 12 critical financial variables for the four BCA/FinTech Sectors (SLR data accessed on 13 June 2024 from Google Scholar/compiled by the authors).

BCA Functionalities (Financial Variables)	BCA/FinTech Sectors (Application Domain Areas)
	Corporate Management	Supply Chain	Banking Industry	Stock Markets
Faithfulness	√	√		√
Fidelity		√		√
Transparency			√
Trust	√			√
(Efficient, scalable, and durable) Performance			√
Integrity	√
Traceability–Accountability	√	√
Loyalty	√	√
Commitment	√	√		√
Privacy			√
Anonymity			√
Security			√

and Table 8) and graphical formats (Figure 10, Figure 11 and Figure 12).

• Comments

In corporate management, BCA has a significant positive effect on 6 out of the 12 financial variables. In the supply chain sector, BCA has a significant positive effect on 5 out of the 12 financial variables. In the banking industry, BCA has a significant positive effect on 5 out of the 12 financial variables, and in the stock market sector, BCA has a significant positive effect on 4 out of the 12 financial variables.

The financial variables faithfulness and commitment appear to be supported by BCA, as BCA functionalities, in three key business sectors (corporate management, supply chain, and stock markets).

Table 8. The items of the proposed sequence “BCA functionalities → Issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities → Implications, theoretical contributions, questions, potentiality, and outlook”.

Implications, Theoretical Contributions, Questions, Potentiality, and Outlook	Issues, Risks, Limitations, and Opportunities	Financial Variables Operated as BCA Functionalities
Capital-intensive investment deters most companies from adopting BCT	High implementation cost (e.g., memory cost)	Faithfulness
Decentralization	Transfer and storage of highly sensitive data	Fidelity
Scalability	Enhance sustainability efforts by improving tracking and verifying emissions	Transparency
Track carbon balances and other environmental metric	Skill gaps	Trust
Auditability	Security risks	Performance
Holding companies accountable for their sustainability claims	Performance-related limitations	Integrity
How to protect data subjects against data harm (privacy breach, exploitation, disempowerment)	Integration-related issues with another company’s units	Traceability–Accountability
Data privacy		Loyalty
Trust among users		Commitment
Governance and internal control		Privacy
Direct peer-to-peer transactions via cryptocurrencies eliminate middlemen and reduce transaction time		Anonymity
Harmonizing the innovative BCT spirit with the pragmatic needs of financial governance. Nevertheless, increased regulations could suppress innovation, leading to less dynamic BCA.		Security

Table 8. The items of the proposed sequence “BCA functionalities → Issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities → Implications, theoretical contributions, questions, potentiality, and outlook”.

Implications, Theoretical Contributions, Questions, Potentiality, and Outlook	Issues, Risks, Limitations, and Opportunities	Financial Variables Operated as BCA Functionalities
Capital-intensive investment deters most companies from adopting BCT	High implementation cost (e.g., memory cost)	Faithfulness
Decentralization	Transfer and storage of highly sensitive data	Fidelity
Scalability	Enhance sustainability efforts by improving tracking and verifying emissions	Transparency
Track carbon balances and other environmental metric	Skill gaps	Trust
Auditability	Security risks	Performance
Holding companies accountable for their sustainability claims	Performance-related limitations	Integrity
How to protect data subjects against data harm (privacy breach, exploitation, disempowerment)	Integration-related issues with another company’s units	Traceability–Accountability
Data privacy		Loyalty
Trust among users		Commitment
Governance and internal control		Privacy
Direct peer-to-peer transactions via cryptocurrencies eliminate middlemen and reduce transaction time		Anonymity
Harmonizing the innovative BCT spirit with the pragmatic needs of financial governance. Nevertheless, increased regulations could suppress innovation, leading to less dynamic BCA.		Security

5.6.1. First Layer of the Proposed SLR Research Sequence (RQ1: What Are the Financial Variables (BCA Functionalities) of Present BCA/FinTech Applications and Their Implications in a Particular Business Sector?)

CM: Six (6) financial variables, operated as BCA functionalities for corporate management, are produced: loyalty, commitment, faithfulness, integrity, trust, and traceability–accountability (Figure 10: top left).

SC: Five (5) financial variables, operated as BCA functionalities for the supply chain, are produced: loyalty, commitment, faithfulness, traceability–accountability, and fidelity (Figure 10: top right).

BI: Five (5) financial variables, operated as BCA functionalities for the banking industry, are produced: transparency, (efficient, scalable, and durable) performance, anonymity, security, and privacy (Figure 10: bottom left).

SM: Four (4) financial variables, operated as BCA functionalities for the stock markets, are produced: commitment, faithfulness, trust, and fidelity (Figure 10: bottom right).

Figure 10. The first layer of the proposed SLR research sequence (RQ1)—pie chart graphical format.

Figure 10. The first layer of the proposed SLR research sequence (RQ1)—pie chart graphical format.

5.6.2. Second Layer of the Proposed SLR Research Sequence (RQ2: What Are the Issues and Opportunities Associated with Financial Variables Operated as BCA Functionalities in a Particular Business Sector?)

CM: Four (4) issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities for corporate management are produced: security risks, skill gaps, integrated-related issues, and performance-related limitations (Figure 11: top left).

SC: Four (4) issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities for the supply chain are produced: security risks, enhanced sustainability efforts, the transfer and storage of highly sensitive data, and high implementation costs (Figure 11: top right).

BI: Five (5) issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities for the banking industry are produced: enhanced sustainability efforts, performance-related limitations, skill gaps, security risks, and the transfer and storage of highly sensitive data (Figure 11: bottom left).

SM: Four (4) issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities for the stock markets are produced: integration-related issues, performance-related limitations, the transfer and storage of highly sensitive data, and security risks (Figure 11: bottom right).

Figure 11. The second layer of the proposed SLR research sequence (RQ2)—pie chart graphical format.

Figure 11. The second layer of the proposed SLR research sequence (RQ2)—pie chart graphical format.

5.6.3. Third Layer of the Proposed SLR Research Sequence (RQ3: What Are the Implications, Theoretical Contributions (Hypotheses, Propositions, Etc.), Questions, Potentiality, and Outlook of BCA/FinTech Issues, Risks, Limitations, and Opportunities in a Particular Business Sector?)

CM: Five (5) implications, theoretical contributions, questions, potentiality, and outlooks are produced (RQ3): how to protect data subjects against data harm, governance and internal control, auditability, direct peer-to-peer transactions via cryptocurrencies eliminating middlemen and reducing transaction time, and scalability (Figure 12: top left).

SC: Four (4) implications, theoretical contributions, questions, potentiality, and outlooks are produced (RQ3): data privacy, harmonizing innovation BCT spirit, trust among users, and decentralization (Figure 12: top right).

BI: Three (3) implications, theoretical contributions, questions, potentiality, and outlooks are produced (RQ3): capital-intensive investments, holding companies accountable for their sustainability claims, and track carbon balances and other environmental metrics (Figure 12: bottom left).

SM: Three (3) implications, theoretical contributions, questions, potentiality, and outlooks are produced (RQ3): how to protect data subjects against data harm, direct peer-to-peer transactions via cryptocurrencies eliminating middlemen and reducing transaction time, and data privacy (Figure 12: bottom right).

Figure 12. The third layer of the proposed SLR research sequence (RQ3)—pie chart graphical format.

Figure 12. The third layer of the proposed SLR research sequence (RQ3)—pie chart graphical format.

5.7. Statistics

Analyzing the SLR derivative information from Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, Table 4 and Table 5, content classification information (see Table 9 and Figure 13), and spatial–temporal evolution information (see Table 10 and Figure 14) are produced as integrated accumulated knowledge.

5.7.1. Content Classification Statistics

An academic content classification analysis, using as an organizing framework the customized PRISMA-adapted protocol, was conducted to quantify content in the academic literature based on the defined inclusion/exclusion criteria (i.e., the six BCA/FinTech application areas, the eight assumptions/SLR key findings, and the 12 financial variables).

The results of this content classification analysis are presented in Table 9 and Figure 13.

Table 9. Percentage (%) per continent/country of the seven most cited articles on BCA/FinTech (data accessed on 13 June 2024 from Google Scholar/compiled by the authors).

Continent or Country	BCA/FinTech Sectors (Application Domain Areas)
	Corporate Management	Supply Chain	Banking Industry	Stock Markets	Mean (7 Most Cited Articles in BCA/FinTech)
USA	28.57%	28.57%	14.29%	21.43%	23.21%
Europe	---	14.29%	14.29%	14.29%	10.72%
China (PRC)	28.57%	---	14.29%	14.29%	14.29%
Asia	28.57%	42.85%	42.84%	35.70%	37.49%
Canada	14.29%	14.29%	14.29%	14.29%	14.29%
	100%	100%	100%	100%	100%

Table 9. Percentage (%) per continent/country of the seven most cited articles on BCA/FinTech (data accessed on 13 June 2024 from Google Scholar/compiled by the authors).

Continent or Country	BCA/FinTech Sectors (Application Domain Areas)
	Corporate Management	Supply Chain	Banking Industry	Stock Markets	Mean (7 Most Cited Articles in BCA/FinTech)
USA	28.57%	28.57%	14.29%	21.43%	23.21%
Europe	---	14.29%	14.29%	14.29%	10.72%
China (PRC)	28.57%	---	14.29%	14.29%	14.29%
Asia	28.57%	42.85%	42.84%	35.70%	37.49%
Canada	14.29%	14.29%	14.29%	14.29%	14.29%
	100%	100%	100%	100%	100%

Figure 13. Percentage (%) per continent/country of the seven most cited articles on BCA/FinTech (data accessed on 13 June 2024 from Google Scholar/compiled by the authors).

Figure 13. Percentage (%) per continent/country of the seven most cited articles on BCA/FinTech (data accessed on 13 June 2024 from Google Scholar/compiled by the authors).

• Comments

The most cited papers (37.5%) were written by researchers at Asian universities and research centers, as Table 9 and Figure 13 demonstrate. Furthermore, the P.R. of China accounts for nearly 52% of Asian contribution; that is, more than one out of every two Asian papers that have the biggest influence on the BCA/FinTech field originates from China!

5.7.2. Spatial–Temporal Evolution Statistics

After running a spatial–temporal evolution analysis on data presented in Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, Table 4 and Table 5 data (28 most cited articles), the temporal evolution of increased citations from 2014 to 2022 for the seven most referenced publications is displayed in Table 10 and highlighted with a bar graph in Figure 14.

Table 10. Temporal evolution of increasing citations, for the seven most cited articles on BCA/FinTech ecosystem (data accessed on 13 June 2024 from Google Scholar/compiled by the authors).

BCA/FinTech Application Sectors	Comments	No. of Papers from the Seven Most Cited Articles on BCA/FinTech
Stock Markets	Incremental linear growth	0	1	3	0	3	0	0	0	0
Banking Industry	Stable citing growth	0	0	2	0	2	1	0	0	2
Supply Chain.	Incremental non-linear growth	0	0	2	1	2	2	0	0	0
Corporate Management	Incremental linear growth	1	0	2	1	2	1	0	0	0
		2014	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022

Table 10. Temporal evolution of increasing citations, for the seven most cited articles on BCA/FinTech ecosystem (data accessed on 13 June 2024 from Google Scholar/compiled by the authors).

BCA/FinTech Application Sectors	Comments	No. of Papers from the Seven Most Cited Articles on BCA/FinTech
Stock Markets	Incremental linear growth	0	1	3	0	3	0	0	0	0
Banking Industry	Stable citing growth	0	0	2	0	2	1	0	0	2
Supply Chain.	Incremental non-linear growth	0	0	2	1	2	2	0	0	0
Corporate Management	Incremental linear growth	1	0	2	1	2	1	0	0	0
		2014	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022

Figure 14. The temporal evolution of increasing citations, for the seven most cited articles on BCA/FinTech ecosystem (data accessed on 13 June 2024 from Google Scholar/compiled by the authors).

Figure 14. The temporal evolution of increasing citations, for the seven most cited articles on BCA/FinTech ecosystem (data accessed on 13 June 2024 from Google Scholar/compiled by the authors).

• Comments

The two years with the highest citation rates were 2016 (30.95%; 13 of the 42 articles) and 2018 (35.71%; 15 of the 42 articles), indicating the significance of this field of research for the period 2016–2018.

Moreover, there were no published papers in 2020 or 2021, most likely as a result of the COVID-19 unrest that impacted academic and research communities.

6. Discussion

An essential component of scientific study is reviewing articles, sometimes known as literature reviews. Although there are many guides available on literature reviews, they are frequently restricted to the nomenclature, protocols, and philosophy of review procedures, which leads to non-parsimonious reporting and confusion because of overlapping similarities [13,46,56].

A practical PRISMA-adapted approach (protocol) was introduced to demystify and shape the academic practice of conducting literature reviews to address the aforementioned limitations [57,58]. The types, foci, considerations, techniques, and contributions of literature reviews as stand-alone, autonomous studies were the main topics of this tailored protocol [46,57].

Understanding literature reviews as independent studies is essentially (i) necessary to address issues and problems raised earlier; (ii) vital to counterbalance and strengthen our understanding; and (iii) relevant and appropriate considering the increasing number of literature reviews conducted as independent studies [13,56,57,58].

The paper proposes an SLR to document the present applications, and their implications, issues, and future outlook of the corporate BCA for disrupting FinTech functionalities. Further, it highlights the challenges and opportunities associated with the BCA in different business and finance areas as a “three research questions SLR discussion” related to four business sectors and financial functions.

The raw data were collected from extended bibliographic and literature research regarding corporate blockchain adoption for disrupting financial technology functionalities, with regard to four business and financial functions (corporate management, supply chain, banking industry, and stock markets) [67]. After SLR projection and academic content filtering with particular inclusion/exclusion criteria, six key findings were recorded that should be regarded as self-judging assumptions [58,69,70].

From these six key findings, the first (“Smart contract utilization advances BCA/FinTech loyalty, commitment, and faithfulness”) and second (“Credit corruption problems in BCA/FinTech are considered trust issues in digital transactions (banking industry, stock markets, government, etc.”) shows functional presence in all four business sectors and financial functions of the BCA/FinTech application domain (see Table 5).

Furthermore, the third key finding (“Information sharing problems in BCA/FinTech are considered fidelity issues in markets, investments, and financial services”), and the sixth assumption (“By adopting cryptocurrencies the BCA/FinTech become more efficient, scalable, and durable with anonymity, security, privacy, and transparency functionalities”) shows functional presence in three business sectors and financial functions of the BCA/FinTech application domain (see Table 5).

Additionally, the business sectors, of the selected BCA/FinTech application domain, “Corporate management”, and “Supply chain” appear to have the highest assumption acceptance rate, with five out of the six key findings, i.e., an assumption acceptance rate of 83%.

From the six key findings, 12 financial variables operated as BCA functionalities have been produced. In corporate management, BCA has a significant positive effect on 11 out of the 12 financial variables. In the supply chain sector, BCA has a significant positive effect on 7 out of the 12 financial variables. In the banking industry, BCA has a significant positive effect on 10 out of the 12 financial variables, and in the stock market sector, BCA has a significant positive effect on 10 out of the 12 financial variables. The financial variables faithfulness, trust, loyalty, and commitment appear to be supported by BCA in all four key business sectors (see Table 6, Table 7 and Table 8 and Figure 10, Figure 11 and Figure 12).

Although the data from Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, Table 4 and Table 5 are produced from self-judging inclusion and exclusion criteria and the six self-arguing assumptions, the proposed SLR method provides solid pieces of evidence for logical arguments. Hence, 37.5% of the most cited papers were written by researchers at Asian universities and research centers, as Table 9 and Figure 13 demonstrate. Furthermore, China accounts for 53.8% of Asian papers; that is, more than one out of every two Asian papers that have the biggest influence on the BCA/FinTech field originates from China!

Additionally, as Table 10 and Figure 14 display, the two years with the highest citation rates were 2016 and 2018 with 9 of the 28 top-cited articles (i.e., 32.14%) per year and 10,968 (38.88%) and 7797 (27.57%) accumulated citations, respectively. Moreover, there were no published papers in 2020 or 2021, most likely because of the COVID-19 unrest that impacted the academic and research communities.

As theoretical contributions of the proposed study, the following have been discussed in the RQ3 commentary: how to protect data subjects against data harm (from security risks and skill gap issues), data privacy (from security risks and the transfer and storage of highly sensitive data issues), harmonizing the innovation BCT spirit with pragmatic needs of financial governance (from integration-related issues with another company’s units, and performance-related limitations), trust among users (from the transfer and storage of highly sensitive data risks), holding companies accountable for their sustainability claims (from enhanced sustainability efforts by improving tracking and verifying emissions opportunities), track carbon balances and other environmental metrics (from enhanced sustainability efforts by improving tracking and verifying emissions opportunities), and decentralization (from performance-related limitations).

Finally, as practical implications, the following have been discussed in the RQ3 commentary: governance and internal control (from security risks and integration-related issues with another company’s units), auditability (from skill gap limitations), direct peer-to-peer transactions via cryptocurrencies eliminating middlemen and reducing transaction time (from skill gaps and performance-related limitations), and scalability (from performance-related limitations).

This study combined an SLR with qualitative analysis as part of a hybrid research approach. Quantitative analysis was carried out on all 835 selected papers in the first step, and qualitative analysis was carried out on the top-cited studies that were screened. The current work highlights the key challenges and opportunities in established blockchain implementations and discusses the outlook potentiality of blockchain technology adoption. This study will be useful to managers and practitioners, as well as to researchers and scholars.

This study suggests a methodical research framework based on the findings above, and even though the use of BCA in resolving business and financial issues is growing, more research is still needed on this topic as it is still in its early stages.

7. Conclusions

The most crucial keywords for this article were “blockchain technology adoption” and “business sectors”. “Document type” was set to “Article or Proceeding article”. Ultimately, 318 papers were screened through the Web of Science, Scopus, and MDPI open-access databases. In particular, a hybrid research approach combining qualitative analysis and SLR was applied in this study. First, all 835 chosen papers were subjected to quantitative analysis. Next, the highly cited papers that passed the screening were subjected to qualitative analysis. Drawing from the aforementioned study, this paper suggests a methodical research framework.

The following are the main contributions of this review. First, business application scenarios, blockchain technology, and BCA concerns are all included in the suggested framework. This methodology offers valuable insights for business practitioners to reevaluate their economic challenges and explore the potential of using blockchain technology to address them. Second, this work suggests several areas for future research. We think that by following these recommendations, business professionals, corporate managers, and blockchain technology specialists may collaborate and significantly impact the business world.

The purpose of this study was to provide an extensive and current organized state-of-the-art scientific understanding of the relationship between BCA and four business sectors. A thorough examination of the conceptual framework of the papers is provided since mapping the scientific output that links BCA functionalities and FinTech was the primary goal.

Reviews of the literature progress scholarly discourse and journal articles covering a wide range of subjects and themes are appearing increasingly frequently. Literature reviews will become even more necessary because of this tendency. Three distinct stakeholder groups are addressed by the guidelines and control points provided in this article: producers (i.e., potential authors), evaluators (i.e., journal editors and reviewers), and users (i.e., novice researchers seeking to expand their knowledge on a specific methodological issue and those instructing the following generation of scholars).

In this study, via bibliographic quality research and qualitative review of applications, implications, challenges, opportunities, and outlook potentiality, we have investigated the corporate BCA for disrupting FinTech functionalities and its influence in four corporate business and financial functions (corporate management, supply chain, banking industry, and stock markets).

The bibliographic study found that BCA has been applied widely in companies and enterprises with a positive FinTech attitude.

7.1. Results and Accomplishments

The results show that BCA can support businesses with a disruptive FinTech mentality by providing knowledge, same-data, and information sharing; enhancing fidelity, integrity, and trust; enhancing organizational procedures; and preventing fraud through the prevention of cyber-hacking and the suspension of fraudulence. Furthermore, the use of smart contracts in blockchain technology provides ESG and sustainability features. Ultimately, BCA will improve security, visibility, and transparency, and reduce costs across the board in the business process within a FinTech ecosystem.

Additionally, the main accomplishments in the existing literature are (i) the recording of BCA/FinTech corporate data (as primitive first-level raw data) organized as six true key findings (assumptions) related to BCA, as it is projected to be a disrupting FinTech corporate environment; and (ii) the conclusions from derivative-quality information from these primitive data, the six certain-to-happen assumptions (key findings), and the four business sectors and financial functions (BCA/FinTech application areas) presented in tabular form (see Table 8).

As was previously mentioned, it is critical to foster uniqueness in business and management practice research. In addition to assisting safe mining practices, academics should be pushed to take on more difficult and dangerous projects. It is crucial to remember that abstracts frequently give the impression that they have a lot of promise since they indicate that the writers hope to significantly advance the field’s conceptual understanding.

7.2. Findings and Practical Applications

This study’s findings are the following: the 6 key findings; the 12 financial variables operated as BCA functionalities and produced from the key findings (RQ1); the 7 issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities associated with the financial variables (RQ2); and the 12 theoretical and practical contributions (RQ3).

Important takeaways from our text are also applicable to practitioners. Notably, our methodology can assist business managers in breaking down and comprehending literature evaluations as sporadic, stand-alone investigations into subjects that are important to their company. Practitioners, for example, find it easier to understand new developments in their area of expertise and to align company actions with these trends.

The study will be useful to practitioners (ESG activities, DEI initiatives, knowledge sharing), the banking industry (smart contracts utilization, transparency, credit corruption, information sharing, and cyber-hacking protection), stock markets (transparency, same data sharing, and fidelity-integrity-trust), and corporate management (smart contracts, effective supply chain tracking, visibility for credit corruption and information sharing, security enhancement, and cost reduction/wealth maximization).

Particularly, for scholars and researchers, the study will help them conduct FinTech interdisciplinary research based on a disrupting cost/benefit analysis for a blockchain adoption policy in corporate management.

7.3. Theoretical and Practical Implications

The state-of-the-art framework presented in this research encompasses the complete framework utilized in the sample papers, making it incredibly significant for the literature. As a result, it offers the scientific community a detailed and understandable guide on how the literature examined the connection between blockchain technology adoption and the four business sectors.

This illustrates how management, ESG, DEI, and business ethics are integrated, leading to a more comprehensive understanding of corporate behavior. The present study’s results corroborate established ideas that link business ethics and duties to corporate performance, implying that aggressive FinTech strategies may compromise corporate social responsibility initiatives.

This article provides businesses with a useful resource on the BCA/CSR area. Businesses should disclose their financial results to give their plan legitimacy, support their CSR stance, and foster positive connections with all of their stakeholders. Lastly, this article is helpful to policymakers since it discloses the tactics used by businesses for BCA while simultaneously establishing their social responsibility. The lessons this paper imparts on the various essential components and methodological subtleties of literature reviews will be valuable to future producers. Implications are related to low-cost, error-free, and faster transaction benefits. Also helpful will be procedural expertise, such as how to employ control points to help with decision-making during the manuscript creation process. The procedural and declarative knowledge that is visible in control points will also be useful to evaluators.

7.4. Contributions

The literature from 2013 to 2023 on “blockchain technology adoption in four business sectors” was reviewed in this study. This study thoroughly searched and examined the research in the area of “blockchain in business” using the SLR methodology.

7.4.1. Theoretical Contributions

The current literature review on blockchain technology is mostly concerned with the technology itself, with little attention paid to how blockchain technology might increase the business value of organizations, and with its experimental applications in various industries. Furthermore, quantitative research on how blockchain technology adds value to business strategies, business procedures, and business models from many subject perspectives is absent from the present review literature.

Through the use of the SLR methodology, this study adds to the body of knowledge on blockchain technology by integrating the most recent advancements in practice and research on blockchain technology and its applications.

By constructing a three-layer research framework (“financial variables operated as BCA functionalities” → “issues, risks, limitations, and opportunities” associated with the financial variables → “implications, theoretical contributions, questions, potentiality, and outlook” of BCA/FinTech issues), this study lists BCA applications in the banking sector, stock markets, supply chain, and corporate management used to generate business value. Based on these findings, a model based on financial factors was developed. By altering corporate strategies, company processes, and business models, this research adds to our understanding of how blockchain technology impacts businesses and individuals. It also creates value for the business community.

Building trust, decentralized governance, and enhanced transaction efficiency are anticipated benefits that blockchain offers as a unique value delivery architecture. However, there are still unanswered questions about how businesses, people, and technology interact to create successful commercial ventures. The results of this study provide a three-layer value creation model for disruptive, creative, and revolutionary innovations in business models, which helps close these knowledge gaps.

7.4.2. Practical Contributions

This research informs practice in the following ways. First, while blockchain is an emerging technology that offers numerous opportunities for meaningful commercial applications, contemporary applications of blockchain are still experimental. Therefore, this study provides an overview of the mainstream protocols and corresponding permission, trust, encryption, and consensus mechanisms that have emerged with the advancement of blockchain technology. For business models, business processes, and business strategies, we further provide rich business operations detailing how organizations and individuals create and capture business value.

More specifically, as we reveal in our research question, the value of blockchain technology can occur in the interaction of three subjects, namely transactions between organizations and individuals (including organizations and organizations, individuals and individuals); the organizational adoption of technology; and the individual adoption of technology. In this sense, the results of this study may help practitioners already operating in the field or intending to venture into the field to gain a comprehensive understanding of the current blockchain ecosystem. This, in turn, helps detect unmet market needs that are best met by offering new blockchain business operations.

By examining “Blockchain in Business”, this paper opens up a business perspective to the technology-driven blockchain technology literature, enhancing understanding of important aspects of the blockchain business model. The research framework proposed in this study can also serve as a tool for business model innovation. Practitioners can use the research framework and models within this review to assess opportunities and barriers to integrating blockchain technology into their current business models. The SLR method adopted in this study can inspire practitioners to innovate business models, allow managers to discover opportunities for business model innovation, and provide blockchain technology-specific support for business model innovation.

By linking technology and applications with economic problems, we provide a map for practitioners to rethink the problems they face and which type of economic problems they belong to and find the possibility of applying blockchain technology to solve the problems.

In addition, based on that, we provide future research topics (discussed in detail in Section 5.2). We believe the future directions provided by this paper are helpful for both researchers and practitioners.

7.5. Limitations and Recommendations

It should be mentioned that using particular search phrases limited this study. It would be advantageous to broaden the analysis to incorporate articles from journals listed in additional worldwide databases, such as EBSCO, ProQuest, Index Copernicus, EconLit, Cabells Journalytics, Ulrich’s, DOAJ, etc.

The study, being self-judging (inclusion/exclusion criteria) and self-arguing (assumption-based key findings) and qualitative in nature, is based on a review of BCT/Fintech literature and is therefore not free from publication, statistical, sample selection, and self-arguing bias. Furthermore, the selected academic content refers to a relatively small number of cited papers (the seven most cited). It does not integrates and presents a complete corporate blockchain adoption framework or a disrupting FinTech model.

According to the findings and limitations, as discussed in RQ3’s comments, harmonizing the innovative BCT spirit with the current “real” needs of financial governance is a future direction. But increased regulations could suppress innovation, leading to a less dynamic BCA (BCA functionalities).

Scholars and researchers could conduct further studies covering sustainability (ESG) and diversity/equity/inclusion (DEI) issues, monetary measurement of transparency, security issues, same-data, and information sharing, cost/benefits, revenue, profit, and investment related to different areas of blockchain and business. This would further help researchers, managers, and practitioners in blockchain applications in business and finance to understand the role of blockchain technology adoption in corporate management with a positive FinTech attitude.

To encourage more clarity regarding BCA functionalities for the four business sectors (discussed as independent SLR projects in this article), it would be worthwhile to look into the relationship between these sectors. Finally, since financial statements and sustainability reports are not typically employed for these kinds of SLR studies, future research may use them as data-gathering strategies.

7.6. Future Research Directions

Three research directions for further SLR investigation are suggested. Initially, blockchain holds immense promise for exchanging and storing information. With the increased usage of the internet and the explosion of big data, an increasing amount of data are being exchanged and stored digitally. How can information exchange be secured against privacy breaches? How can data be safely and affordably stored? What are some ways to convey knowledge more quickly without losing it? Across numerous departments and industries, managers and practitioners are concerned with these questions. Therefore, further research can be conducted on the following topics: (i) Which department or industry can blockchain transform? (ii) How does deploying blockchain affect costs, benefits, and obstacles? (iii) How are adopters of blockchain technology, their partners, and rivals affected? and (iv) How can the adoption of blockchain be assessed?

Second, blockchain can be used as a helpful governance tool to improve openness and lessen fraud and distortion. Since there are governance issues in every economy, researchers can investigate the many application scenarios in more detail. (a) What obstacles need to be removed in order for blockchain technology to be applied to improve various tiers of governance? (b) If blockchain is used, how may it improve intra-organization governance? (c) Can blockchain be used, and if so, how can it be used to improve public scrutiny of public officials or the government?

Thirdly, consensus generation has been less studied in the past, and most studies in this stream only emphasize the removal of a central authority and its benefits. Although K. Christidis and M. Devetsikiotis [15] proved the role of blockchain in smart contracts, mitigating information asymmetry, and IoT competition theoretically, there is not much empirical evidence for increasing market size.

In conclusion, we advocate for empirical investigations utilizing SLR to enhance our comprehension of decentralized systems, namely distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). We further urge scholars to investigate the question of when collusion occurs in a decentralized system and how corporate management may prevent such scenarios. More application scenarios (such as those in agriculture, services, and pharmacy) should also be investigated because they are the industries most likely to see the emergence of disruptive business models.