Digital Scalability and Physical Infrastructure: What Is Associated with Carbon Emissions Within Listed Fintech Firms?

Two features of fintech business models pull firm emissions in opposite directions: digital scalability, proxied by revenue growth, and physical infrastructure, proxied by capital expenditure. We measure both within the firm. Using an unbalanced panel of 86 firms across 18 countries for 2019 to 2025 (494 firm–year observations) from Refinitiv Eikon, we estimate two-way fixed-effects models of log CO2 and test heterogeneity with interaction models, joint Wald tests and small-sample-robust inference. A within-firm one-standard-deviation rise in revenue growth is associated with about 8% lower emissions, roughly 350 tons at the median firm, and is significant in eleven of thirteen specifications. The estimated revenue elasticity of emissions is 0.40: proportionality is rejected, but absolute decoupling is not established. Capital-expenditure intensity is associated with about 6% higher emissions, but the estimate is marginal under the CR2 correction and sensitive to specification. Neither joint test establishes heterogeneity across subsectors or regions, and both have low power. The findings bear on the climate-aligned regulation of digital finance and on how business-model characteristics enter ESG assessment.