Beyond the Branch: Consumer Adoption, Satisfaction, and

Financial Advisor Acceptance of FinTech Services Across Retail

Banking, Challenger, and Wealth Management Segments

Serkan Yilmaz Kandir1,* Murat Ismet Haseki2

1 Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Adana, Turkey

2 Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Cukurova University, Adana, Turkey

Received: January 12, 2025 Revised: March 10, 2025 Accepted: June 17, 2025 ⋆ Corresponding author

ABSTRACT

The structural transformation of retail financial services by mobile banking platforms, FinTech applications, open

banking ecosystems, and AI-powered credit and advisory tools has created both unprecedented opportunities for

financial inclusion and a pronounced gap between adoption rates achievable in high-digital-literacy segments and

those attainable in mainstream and mass-market contexts. Comparative evidence assessing customer satisfaction and

financial advisor acceptance simultaneously across multiple FinTech service domains and institutional segments

remains sparse, limiting the evidence base available to practitioners and policymakers designing inclusive FinTech

deployment strategies. The present investigation enrolled retail banking customers across four institutional segments—

traditional banks, challenger banks, credit unions, and private banking divisions—alongside a parallel cohort of

relationship managers and financial advisors, to assess adoption rates and satisfaction across four FinTech domains:

mobile and digital banking, FinTech financial applications, open banking and personal financial management, and

AI-powered credit assessment and advisory services. Significant between-segment variation was documented across

all four domains, with private banking customers reporting the highest satisfaction and adoption and credit union

customers the lowest. AI-powered credit and advisory services elicited the lowest customer satisfaction across

all segments and the largest customer-advisor divergence. Digital financial literacy and prior FinTech experience

emerged as the two strongest independent predictors of adoption. The investigation contributes a validated crosssegment

measurement instrument, customer-profile-specific adoption profiles, and evidence-based recommendations

for financial service providers deploying FinTech capabilities across heterogeneous customer bases.

Keywords: FinTech adoption Mobile banking Open banking AI credit scoring Customer satisfaction Financial

inclusion Digital financial literacy Challenger banks Financial innovation

1. INTRODUCTION

The retail financial services industry is navigating a structural

transition whose pace and depth exceed any prior wave of

digitisation. Mobile banking has displaced branch visits as

the primary channel for everyday transactions in most developed

markets; challenger banks have acquired tens of millions

of customers without physical infrastructure; open banking

frameworks have created API-mediated data ecosystems enabling

third-party FinTech providers to build services on top

of incumbent data assets; and AI-powered tools for credit

assessment, personalised financial guidance, and fraud detec-