The Financial Strategies and Analysis Department has carried out studies for the development of the fintech ecosystem within the scope of the duty of "Determining strategies in order to develop the area of financial technologies, monitoring the implementation of the decisions taken within the context of these strategies before the relevant public institutions and organizations, and reporting the results to the President of the Republic", which was entrusted to the Finance Office. In the framework of these studies, the Department carried out the study of Fintech Ecosystem Periodic Survey (FEPS) in order to follow the current business situations of the managers of fintech companies, their evaluations regarding the recent past and their expectations for the future.
The Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye monitors the recent evaluations of financial institution managers in Türkiye regarding their business situations and their expectations for the future in the Financial Services Survey (FSS), and derives the Financial Services Confidence Index (FSCI) from the FSS as an indicator reflecting the course of the finance sector. FEPS is conducted and the Fintech Ecosystem Confidence Index (FECI), which summarizes the findings, is calculated in order to compensate for the lack of projection of FSCIin fintechs. The questions prepared by the CBRT in accordance with the "European Union Harmonized Workplace and Consumer Surveys Joint Program" and directed to the incumbent financial institutions were also used in FEPS, and FECI is calculated with the same method as FSCI. This approach makes it possible to monitor the business situation of fintechs more closely compared to the incumbent financial system by comparing both indices, and it is also significant that there is no such continuous study on the fintech sector in Türkiye.
FEPS Application
FSS's monthly and quarterly question sets are the basis for the creating FEPS question sets, and there are 2 survey forms, short and long, directed to fintech companies on a quarterly basis. The short survey form is based on monthly survey questions in FSS, and the long survey form is based on quarterly survey questions in FSS. Moreover, in both surveys, there are questions, regarding the analysis of the fintech ecosystem, for the fintech companies regarding their operating verticals, year of establishment, number of employees and customers, turnover volume, financing sources and R&D expenditures as well as the questions about whether they are in a technopark and their overseas targets. While the long survey form is directed to payment and electronic money institutions defined as financial institutions and authorized by the CBRT, the short survey form is directed to other fintech companies other than these institutions.
Methodology
While calculating the FSCI by the CBRT, the answers given to the survey are weighted by using the balance sheet size (total assets) of financial institutions at the end of the previous year and aggregated on the basis of sub-sectors. Considering that the fintech sector is still developing, there are various difficulties in obtaining the balance sheet data of the companies, and the turnover data in terms of the activities of the fintech companies contains more meaningful results regarding the weights of the sector in which they operate, the weighting process is made on the basis of the statements of the fintech companies regarding the turnover data in certain breakdowns addressed to them in the survey form.
