Evaluating the Optimal External Equity Financing Strategy and Critical Factors for the Startup of Lending Company in Taiwan: An Application of Expert Network Decision Model

During enterprise foundation and development, internal finance and debt finance are of vital importance to start-up entrepreneurs. Therefore, the purpose of this study is mainly to focus on how start-ups can make the optimal evaluation among different external equity crowdfunding solutions and to establish a network decision support model that evaluates the optimal financing solution of start-ups for external equity crowdfunding based on decision science and network architecture. The Lending Company in Financial Technology Industry (LCFTI) was taken as an example. The results indicate that equity crowdfunding is the optimal financing plan in LCFTI. Academically, the results of this study not only help propose a network decision support model using decision science methods and implementing the network analysis to establish an architecture to evaluate the optimal financing plans of start-ups for external equity crowdfunding, they also makes up for the gap in the optimal financing plans of entrepreneurs or start-ups for external equity financing, which has not been specified in the POT theory in the past. Practically, this study provides a useful tool for the entrepreneur of LCFTI to understand the key factors affecting the optimal financing plans for external equity financing and enables LCFTI to measure the optimal financing plans for external equity financing to improve the success rate of finance.