Fintech Services and the Drivers of Their Implementation in Small and Medium Enterprises

Abstract

Fintech has been one of the biggest agents of change in the financial sector worldwide, deserving an in-depth analysis as the aim of this study (including factors leading to its adoption, consequences, etc.). During the COVID-19 pandemic, the financial area and Fintech services allied to technology has increased efficiency, convenience, and security. To better understand this type of service, the research follows a quantitative methodology. The quantitative method included a questionnaire survey of companies that are Fintech customers, totaling 49 valid responses from firms (collected over a three-month period and which involved sending over a thousand emails to numerous companies). The response rate was low due to both the pandemic and the conjuncture with major war, which are generating uncertainty in business. The analysis was based on descriptive statistics, an assessment of the metric qualities of the scales, reliability and an Exploratory Factor Analysis, Pearson correlations and Hypothesis testing. The positive and significant effect of the technological context (perceived convenience, usefulness and effectiveness and perceived safety and trust) and the organizational context (ecological footprint reduction and internal cost reduction) on Fintech service adoption intention was confirmed. Hypothesis Three was partially confirmed since only consumer trends and reputation perception have a positive and significant effect on the intention to adopt Fintech by SMEs. The moderating effect of the environmental context in the relationship between the technological context and the intention to adopt Fintech by SMEs was partially proven, but the same was not verified in the relationship between the organizational context and the intention to adopt Fintech by SMEs. Portugal seems to be on the same adoption path as the rest of the western world, and Fintech services will undoubtedly increase, in a kind of revolution in which the strongest and those able to adapt to the markets and their needs will survive.

Research on the Impact of Digital Inclusive Finance on Green Innovation of SMEs

“…As an important way to break the limitations of traditional financial institutions in terms of space and information transmission [30], reduce the cost and threshold of financial services [31], and empower the development of corporate innovation, the emerging concept of digital financial inclusion has received extensive attention from academics, but most of it focuses on the study of the mechanism of the impact of digital financial inclusion on corporate innovation. Scholars generally believe that digital inclusive finance mainly promotes enterprises to innovate in a variety of ways, such as easing financing constraints [32][33][34], enhancing the motivation of non-controlling shareholders [35], expanding market potential [36], mitigating information asymmetry [37], improving the efficiency of loan approval by financial institutions [38], alleviating resource misallocation, and incentivizing enterprises to increase R&D investment [5].…”

“…The digitization level of inclusive finance measures the value of digital inclusive finance through the convenience of digital inclusive financial services, the level of borrowing costs, and the degree of creditization. Moreover, this paper draws on relevant studies on digital inclusive finance, and these variables are transformed into the logarithmic scale [31,50,51].…”

Application of Multiple Linear Regression on Factors Affecting the Acceptance of Financial Technology Among UiTM Students

“…Multiple linear regression is one of the most fundamental statistical models due to its simplicity and interpretability of results (Moreira-Santos et al, 2022). Multiple linear regression is used to assess the dependent variable's dependency on more than two explanatory factors.…”

Fintech: Evidence of the Urgent Need to Improve Financial Literacy in Portugal

“…This is how Fintech came to be one of the most crucial innovations in the financial area (Lee and Shin 2018), which provides all the services also provided by traditional banking, such as credits, payments, and transfers, among others (Fernandes 2019), and which has been evolving rapidly, due in part to favorable regulations, information technologies, and the "sharing economy" (Lee and Shin 2018). Fintech represents one of the biggest agents of change in the financial sector worldwide (Moreira-Santos et al 2022), and its growth reveals a major challenge for traditional banking, which is attentive to its impacts on the banking sector (Fernandes 2019;Jones and Ozcan 2021).…”