Leveraging Platform Thinking for Service Innovation in Highly Regulated Industries: A Perspective on the Financial Services Sector

Digital platforms have become a dominant business model in the contemporary economy, yet their application in highly regulated sectors remains underexplored. This paper examines how platform thinking shapes service innovation in the European digital payments sector through a longitudinal analysis of 20 leading fintech unicorns. First, regulatory maturity acts as a structuring force, channeling experimentation and enabling scaling once institutional arrangements stabilise. Second, platform thinking is operationalised differently across segments: B2C firms redesign customer experience, B2B firms expand functionality and data-driven infrastructures. Third, a four-stage process model emerges: experimentation, development, enhancement, and expansion. The study contributes to platform strategy, service innovation, and regulated industry literatures, and suggests that managers should treat regulation as a design parameter rather than a barrier to innovation.