“Capital Injection + Post-Investment Empowerment”: The Dual Engines of Fintech Industry Development

Abstract

Despite the rapid expansion of financing scale in the fintech industry, only 32% of enterprises can break through the growth bottleneck. The core contradiction lies in the disconnection between capital injection and post-investment empowerment. Based on a sample of 327 global fintech companies from 2019 to 2023, this paper constructs a coupling coordination model of “capital injection intensity (CD) – post-investment empowerment depth (ED)” and employs methods such as two-way fixed effects and threshold regression to explore the impact mechanism of the dual engines on enterprise development efficiency. The results show that: (1) A 0.1 increase in the coupling coordination degree of the dual engines significantly enhances the enterprise revenue growth rate by 0.85 percentage points and increases the number of patent applications by 0.56 items, an effect far exceeding that of single capital injection. (2) There is a significant threshold effect. When the capital injection intensity CD≥0.35 and the post-investment empowerment depth ED≥0.42, the marginal effect of the dual engines on the revenue growth rate jumps from 0.52 percentage points to 0.98 percentage points. After breaking through the threshold, the two form a “complementary and synergistic” pattern. (3) The synergistic effect exhibits heterogeneity in fields and regions. Blockchain companies are most sensitive to the dual engines, while payment companies are the least sensitive. North American companies have significantly higher collaborative efficiency than Asian companies. This study quantifies the critical standards for the synergy of “capital - empowerment” for the first time, providing theoretical support and practical guidelines for equity investment institutions to optimize resource allocation, fintech companies to accurately connect with elements, and regulatory authorities to formulate differentiated policies.