An Event Study on Stock Market Reactions to Media Disclosures of FinTech Investments: The Case of Korea

Abstract As FinTech adoption by financial institutions accelerates, the capital-market effects of these technological investments remain incompletely understood. While prior studies typically examine FinTech as a single homogeneous category, technological heterogeneity—across artificial intelligence, blockchain, big data, and the Internet of Things—and industry-specific contexts may produce differentiated stock-price reactions. This study investigates whether media disclosures of FinTech investments by Korean financial institutions generate statistically significant abnormal returns and cumulative abnormal returns, and whether these reactions differ systematically by industry (insurance, securities, banking) and technology type. Using 451 FinTech-related disclosure events from 2016–2020, we apply simple market-model event-study procedures together with two-way analysis of variance. The results show that FinTech investment disclosures produce heterogeneous signaling effects across industries and technologies. Importantly, results confirm significant industry-technology interaction effects, indicating that each technology’s value and risk are interpreted differently across industry contexts. A notable methodological contribution is the explicit treatment of imbalanced event counts, which affects statistical power in certain subsamples. Robustness diagnostics confirm that the heterogeneity patterns are not statistical artifacts but reflect technology-specific and industry-specific valuation dynamics. This study provides new evidence on how financial markets interpret FinTech innovation, offering insights for investors, regulators, and financial institutions.