Volume 5 • Issue 1 • PP: 39–50 • 2025
Beyond the Branch: Consumer Adoption, Satisfaction, and Financial Advisor Acceptance of FinTech Services Across Retail Banking, Challenger, and Wealth Management Segments
View PDF 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
References
[1] D. W. Arner, J. N. Barberis, and R. P. Buckley, “The evolution of FinTech: A new post-crisis paradigm?” Georgetown Journal of International Law, vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 1271–1319, 2016, available via Georgetown Law.
[2] I. Lee and Y. J. Shin, “FinTech: Ecosystem, business models, investment decisions, and challenges,” BusinessHorizons, vol. 61, no. 1, pp. 35–46, 2018.
[3] P. Gomber, J.-A. Koch, and M. Siering, “Digital finance and FinTech: Current research and future research directions,” Journal of Business Economics, vol. 87, no. 5, pp. 537–580, 2017.
[4] M. Zachariadis and P. Ozcan, “The API economy and digital transformation in financial services: The case of open banking,” SWIFT Institute, London, United Kingdom, Tech. Rep., 2017, sWIFT Institute Working Paper No. 2016-001.
[5] L. Brodsky and L. Oakes, “Data sharing and open banking,” McKinsey & Company, New York, NY, Tech. Rep., 2017, mcKinsey Global Banking & Securities Practice.
[6] T. Philippon, “On FinTech and financial inclusion,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, Tech. Rep., 2019.
[7] P. K. Ozili, “Impact of digital finance on financial inclusion and stability,” Borsa Istanbul Review, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 329–340, 2018.
[8] H.-S. Ryu, “What makes users willing or reluctant to use FinTech? the moderating effect of user type,” Industrial Management & Data Systems, vol. 118, no. 3, pp. 541– 569, 2018.
[9] KPMG International, “Pulse of FinTech H2 2021: Global analysis of investment in FinTech,” KPMG International, Amstelveen, The Netherlands, Tech. Rep., 2022, available at https://kpmg.com.
[10] F. D. Davis, “Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology,” MIS Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 319–340, 1989.
[11] V. Venkatesh, M. G. Morris, G. B. Davis, and F. D. Davis, “User acceptance of information technology: Toward a unified view,” MIS Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 425–478, 2003.
[12] G. Baptista and T. Oliveira, “Understanding mobile banking: The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology combined with cultural moderators,” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 50, no. C, pp. 418–430, 2015.
[13] E. M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. New York, NY: Free Press, 2003, iSBN: 978-0743222099.
[14] C. M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 1997, iSBN: 978- 0875845852.
[15] W. H. DeLone and E. R. McLean, “The DeLone and McLean model of information systems success: A tenyear update,” Journal of Management Information Systems, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 9–30, 2003.
[16] N. Iman, “Is mobile payment still relevant in the Fin- Tech era?” Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, vol. 30, no. C, pp. 72–82, 2018.
[17] T. Puschmann, “FinTech,” Business & Information Systems Engineering, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 69–76, 2017.
[18] J. W. Schindler, “FinTech and financial innovation: Drivers and depth,” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Washington, DC, Tech. Rep., 2017.
[19] I. Anagnostopoulos, “FinTech and RegTech: Impact on regulators and banks,” Journal of Economics and Business, vol. 100, no. C, pp. 7–25, 2018.
[20] D. A. Zetzsche, R. P. Buckley, D. W. Arner, and J. N. Barberis, “Regulating a revolution: From regulatory sandboxes to smart regulation,” Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 31–103, 2017, available via Fordham Law.
[21] S. Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system,” White paper, 2008, available at https://bitcoin. org/bitcoin.
[22] B. G. Buchanan, “Artificial intelligence in finance,” The Alan Turing Institute, London, United Kingdom, Tech. Rep., 2019.
[23] L. Cao, “Artificial intelligence and finance: Challenges, techniques, and opportunities,” ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 55, no. 3, pp. 64:1–64:38, 2022.
[24] J. Jagtiani and C. Lemieux, “The roles of alternative data and machine learning in FinTech lending: Evidence from the LendingClub consumer platform,” Journal of Economics and Business, vol. 100, no. C, pp. 43–53, 2019.
[25] I. Goldstein, W. Jiang, and G. A. Karolyi, “To FinTech and beyond,” Review of Financial Studies, vol. 32, no. 5, pp. 1647–1661, 2019.
[26] L. W. Cong and Z. He, “Blockchain disruption and smart contracts,” Review of Financial Studies, vol. 32, no. 5, pp. 1754–1797, 2019.
[27] A. Lagna and M. N. Ravishankar, “Making the world a better place with FinTech research,” Information Systems Journal, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 61–102, 2022.
[28] D. Wojcik, “Financial geography I: Exploring FinTech,” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 600– 610, 2021.
[29] P. Gomber, R. J. Kauffman, C. Parker, and B. W. Weber, “On the FinTech revolution: Interpreting the forces of innovation, disruption, and transformation in financial services,” Journal of Management Information Systems, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 220–265, 2018.
[30] P. K. Ozili, “FinTech research: Current research topics and future research directions,” Journal of Risk and Financial Management, vol. 15, no. 9, p. 404, 2022.
[31] T. Muganyi, L. Yan, Y. Yin, H. Sun, X. Gong, and . Taghizadeh-Hesary, “FinTech, regtech, and financial development: Evidence from China,” Financial Innovation, vol. 8, no. 1, p. 29, 2022.
[32] A.-L. Mention, “The future of FinTech,” Research- Technology Management, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 59–63, 2019.
Cite This Article
Choose your preferred format