Investment strategies of bank-affiliated and independent venture capitalists: a focus on innovation in the fintech sector in the wake of the global financial crisis

We investigate how bank-affiliated VCs (BVCs) change their investment strategy in fintech startups relative to independent VCs (IVCs) after the global financial crisis (GFC). To this end, we use the concept of mimetic isomorphism as a theoretical lens. We measure the innovation level of invested ventures by resorting to patent and patent quality data and several proxies deriving from text mining and semantic network analysis. We look at the selection dynamics of VCs based on the innovation level of their target ventures. We analyze data on VC investments in 6711 fintech ventures worldwide from 1995 to 2019. Our findings show that BVCs have changed, compared to IVCs, their patterns of investments after the exogenous shock provided by the GFC. While BVCs selected less innovative ventures compared to IVCs before the crisis, they aligned with IVCs by choosing more innovative ventures after the crisis.