Publications

February 2024
Case

Tabby: Winning Consumers' Digital Wallets

By: Eva Ascarza and Fares Khrais

Hosam Arab (MBA 2009), cofounder and CEO of Tabby, a Saudi-based fintech startup, raised its Series D funding round in October 2023, four years after its inception, valuing it as a regional unicorn. Tabby's core product, a buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) service, allowed... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Business Startups; Risk Management; Competitive Strategy; Expansion; Financial Services Industry; Technology Industry; Saudi Arabia

Social Enterprise | Harvard Business School

student and alumni projects, and recruiting. Faculty & Research Engage with faculty creating groundbreaking research that links theory and practice to shape the future of social enterprise. Core Innovation Capital: Investing in Fintech... View Details

September 2020
Article

Regulatory Sandboxes: A Cure for mHealth Pilotitis?

By: Abhishek Bhatia, Rahul Matthan, Tarun Khanna and Satchit Balsari

Mobile health (mHealth) and related digital health interventions in the past decade have not always scaled globally as anticipated earlier despite large investments by governments and philanthropic foundations. The implementation of digital health tools has suffered... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; mHealth; Digital Health; Design Thinking; Regulation; Intervention; Regulatory Sandbox; Health Care and Treatment; Technological Innovation; Design; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; India

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2021
Working Paper

CRM and AI in Time of Crisis

By: Michelle Y. Lu and Navid Mojir

A crisis can affect the incentives of various players within a firm’s multi-layered sales and marketing organization (e.g., headquarters and branches of a bank). Such shifts can result in sales decisions against the firm’s best interests. Motivated by the backlash to... View Details

Keywords: CRM; Artificial Intelligence; AI; B2B Marketing; Decision Authority; Crisis Marketing; Intra-organizational Conflict; COVID-19 Pandemic; Customer Relationship Management; Technological Innovation; Decision Making; Strategy; Health Pandemics; Crisis Management; AI and Machine Learning

SSRN

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Browse All Articles, Research, & Case Studies - HBS Working Knowledge

ensuring implementation, and the critical importance of corporate involvement in driving ambitious climate action. 05 Nov 2024 Book Building the Road to 'Small Business Utopia' with AI and Fintech by Karen G. Mills Could artificial... View Details

Hiring Organizations

Fierce Whiskers Distillery Fillip Fingo Africa FinTech Collective Fiserv Five Arrows Managers - Rothschild & Co Flyers Cocktail Co FoodCloud Forbright Bank Ford Motor Company ForgePoint Capital Forward Consumer Partners Founder Collective... View Details

17 Aug 2023
Research & Ideas

‘Not a Bunch of Weirdos’: Why Mainstream Investors Buy Crypto

Retail's Hot Feature Hurts Low-Income Shoppers Are Banks the ‘Bad Guys’? Overdraft Fees Are Crushing Low-Income Customers The Dark Side of Fintech Borrowing Feedback or ideas to share? Email the Working Knowledge team at hbswk@hbs.edu.... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand

July 2019 (Revised April 2021)
Case

Salary Finance

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

In April 2019, Asesh Sarkar, co-founder and chief executive of Salary Finance Limited, a London-based FinTech, faced tough choices. Sarkar had founded Salary Finance with Dan Cobley and Daniel Shakhani in 2015. The company’s value proposition was quite simple: partner... View Details

Keywords: Credit; Financing and Loans; Wages; Innovation and Invention; Expansion; Growth and Development Strategy; Organizational Culture; Decision Choices and Conditions; Financial Services Industry

Organizational Behavior - Faculty & Research

(July–August 2025): 135–139. Greenwood Online: A Fin-Tech Service for Culture and Community By: James Riley and Bernal Cortés July 2025 | Teaching Note | Faculty Research In 2020, Ryan Glover and Paul Judge launched Greenwood, a fintech... View Details

21 Nov 2022
Research & Ideas

Buy Now, Pay Later: How Retail's Hot Feature Hurts Low-Income Shoppers

with Gen Z shoppers in their teens and 20s. The payment method made up $97 billion—or 2.1 percent—of total US e-commerce sales in 2020, a figure that is expected to double by 2024. BNPL is so lucrative, merchants are paying fintech... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Retail; Financial Services; Technology

Behavioral Finance & Financial Stability

investor sentiment measures that it makes available to researchers and the broader public. Please visit our About page for more information about the project. Data Research Invisible Primes: Fintech Lending with Alternative Data By: Marco... View Details

September 2023 (Revised June 2024)
Case

Kaspi.kz: Building Trust through Innovation

By: Sandra J. Sucher, Fares Khrais and Marilyn Morgan Westner

This case is written to help students explore how companies can maintain and develop trust while innovating, how to identify and respond effectively to warning signs that they may not be as trusted as they believe, and how being trusted can aid in expanding and growing... View Details

Keywords: Growth and Development Strategy; Organizational Culture; Trust; Technology Adoption; Innovation and Invention; Banking Industry

Connect with Clubs - Recruiting

Alvarez-Valdes palvarezvaldes@mba2026.hbs.edu Nikki Katthain nkatthain@mba2026.hbs.edu Mihir Menda mmenda@mba2026.hbs.edu Club Email fbus@studentclubs.hbs.edu Finance Club Co-Presidents Gianluca Venegas gvenegas@mba2026.hbs.edu Nils Olsen nolsen@mba2026.hbs.edu Club... View Details

March 2024
Case

Nomad: A License to Bank

By: Paul A. Gompers and Pedro Levindo

In late 2023, Lucas Vargas, CEO and co-founder of Nomad, a fintech that offered financial services in the United States for Brazilian residents, had to decide what to do to ensure the company’s continued expansion. Nomad launched its first product, a U.S. digital bank... View Details

ハーバード - Global

(NP) is the largest Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) fintech service in Japan and is experiencing a slowdown in growth of its core product, NP Atobarai. Launched in 2002 as non-membership service, the NP Atobarai product has given Japanese... View Details

February 2022
Case

NFX Capital and Moov Technologies

By: Scott Duke Kominers and Nicole Tempest Keller

In July 2019, James Currier, a general partner at San Francisco-based NFX Ventures, was considering a seed stage investment of $1.5 million in Moov Technologies, a B2B marketplace for used industrial equipment. NFX was a venture capital firm focused on seed-stage... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Network Effects; Marketplace Matching; Digital Platforms; Market Design; Applications and Software; Semiconductor Industry; Financial Services Industry; San Francisco