An Exploration of the Corporate Criminal Career Using Financial Technology Companies

• In Event: Euroc - Corporate crime: careers and features

Abstract

Developmental and life-course criminology has been employed to investigate the origin of criminal behavior and offending patterns of many types of offenders, including white-collar criminals, but only recently have corporate crime scholars begun applying this approach to corporations rather than individuals. One drawback of typical corporate crime longitudinal datasets, though, is that they choose a random time period that does not usually include the “birth” or origin of the companies. In order to address this limitation, I analyze data on U.S.-based publicly traded financial technology (fintech) companies starting from their origin. Fintech companies use technology to support or enable banking and financial services of businesses or consumers and are tied closely with the financial industry, which is a hotspot for corporate crime. In this paper, I use a sample of 70 Fintech companies to explore the criminal career of corporations by describing the pattern of criminal behavior among the firms.

Author

• Natalie Schell-Busey, Rowan Univeristy