April 2, 2026
DALLAS, Texas – Southeastern Oklahoma State University assistant professor of finance Dr. Arthur Tran was recently honored as the recipient of the “Best Paper” Award at the 65th Annual Meeting of the Southwestern Finance Association.
The SWFA conference is a respected academic finance conference and an important venue for presenting new research and receiving scholarly feedback. The 2026 participants represented more than 100 universities and institutions across 15 countries, including researchers from the Federal Reserve Board and Federal Reserve Banks.
In the paper titled “FinTech Small Business Lending: Do FinTechs Provide Business Loans to Under-banked Groups?”, Dr. Tran and Dr. Drew Winters of Texas Tech University examine whether financial technology (FinTech) lenders do a better job than traditional banks at serving under-banked small-business owners, especially minority- and female-owned firms. They find that, for minority-owned businesses, FinTechs generally do not outperform large banks and often appear to perform worse than community banks, though they do seem to be more favorable toward female-owned firms.
Dr. Tran joined the faculty of the John Massey School of Business in 2023 serving as an Assistant Professor of Finance in the Department of Accounting and Finance. His research area of emphasis is FinTech and community banking. Dr. Tran is a long-time Texan and Oklahoman who completed his Ph.D. at Texas Tech University and earned his BSBA and his MBA from the University of Central Missouri.