Are Fintechs Really a Hype? A Machine Learning-Based Polarity Analysis of Brazilian Posts on Social Media

Fintechs are technology companies that, in contrast to traditional banks, are engaged in digital solutions for payment, money transfers, and real-time notifications. Taking advantage of digital means of communication, most of the service interactions between fintechs and customers occurs via chats or posts in social media. In this work, our goal is to use machine learning to analyze these posts and identify what are the terms used by customers to express positive, neutral and negative customer experiences. During this analysis, we assess the following questions using data from the 3 biggest fintechs in Brazil: (i) what are the most commented topics on social media regarding fintechs, (ii) what are the words more often used by customers to express positive, negative and neutral reactions to the customer service obtained; and (iii) what kind of machine learning model should a fintech use to automatically identify whether a post is positive, negative or neutral.