Customer Centricity and involvement in Swedish fintech innovation : An exploratory research on the customers role in Swedish fintech

Abstract: Fintech has had a huge growth in Sweden during the last decades. Increased competition has made companies compete over resources to attend to customer needs. The access to customer knowledge is one of those resources. This thesis is exploring the if, how and when companies within the Swedish fintech industry use customer knowledge and customers in co-creation processes. The research was conducted with a literature review and empirically investigated with semi-structured interviews. The findings imply that customer knowledge and customer involvement is present in Swedish fintech. Companies in Swedish fintech don’t use only one approach to involve customers but rather switch according to convenience. When it comes to the phases of innovation the findings imply that companies mostly involve customers in the ideation phase and customers in an intermediate phase between development and commercialization where there are a lot of iterative interactions between customer and company.