In the past decade, the financial industry has been criticized to lack a faster digital transformation to provide more efficient services, where FinTech (a neologism generated from the contraction of “(Fin)ancial” and “(Tech)nology”) start-ups or fintechs represent a paradigm shift to reinvent the industry. FinTech is gaining attention in multiple academic disciplines, however, it was found that it has been neglected from the international business discipline to understand the internationalization process of fintechs. Furthermore, as the financial industry is an important cornerstone to foster economic growth and social welfare, particularly in the context of Latin American emerging countries, lack of studies in this context also motivated the development of this thesis. The purpose of this study is to accommodate FinTech in the international business discipline drawing from network theory and born-digital firms’ characteristics, emphasizing on core activities within the digital value chain to analyze the internationalization process and identify the main challenges. A conceptual framework was developed to analyze the internationalization process of Ecuadorian fintechs and the challenges faced. The research has a qualitative approach, employing multiple case studies strategy, where semi-structured interviews with founders and senior managers of four Ecuadorian fintechs were conducted. Empirical findings showed that despite having a high digital value chain and take advantage of internet technologies to internationalize faster, Ecuadorian fintechs followed a gradual regional expansion within Latin American countries and their internationalization process was mostly network-driven. Furthermore, besides the most prominent internationalization challenges such as liabilities of outsidership (LoO) and institutional regulations, additional resource-related internationalization challenges were found such as funding, skilled IT talents and innovation, which raise the importance to emphasize in such challenges for further research.

This thesis focus lies on the topic of business ecosystems and their use for digital firms in their internationalisation. The aim is to investigate the value creation and capture process for digital firms through the perspective of business ecosystems. For this endeavour, different concepts such as the born digital theory, key interlinked internationalisation process theories and business ecosystems theory are described throughout the literature review. Other models of previous researchers are used as a foundation to render an own created framework that is more applicable to the scenario and combination of the three aspects this paper investigates. The knowledge gap defined by the authors is about adding new insights on the ecosystem perspective in international businesses by exploring the value creation and capture process of born digitals. Furthermore, it will display the bottlenecks and benefits deriving from a business ecosystem. This leads to the research questions investigating the utilisation of business ecosystems for value creation and capture in internationalisation of digital firms, as well as the bottlenecks and benefits that come with it. For the empirical data collection to receive insights on the research questions and successfully draw conclusions, semi-structured interviews were conducted within the scope of a multiple case study. In addition, secondary data from various authors and experts in the respective research areas were used to bedrock the findings.As the results of the study showed, business ecosystems are greatly appreciated and utilised by digital firms. Moreover, they create value for them and let them strive in many ways, such as focusing on their core business, to succeed and be able to enter new markets. This is only possible with the cooperation of the various actors in the business ecosystem. Nevertheless, there are also severe bottlenecks that have been brought to light that reach beyond what has been present in the literature and considered by other scholars, as well as benefits that keep them competitive. Furthermore, this study provides managerial implications on how to deal with the liability of outsidership and smallness, and for the policy implications, that policymakers should be aware of global and political issues, and their impact on businesses.