Customer Fintech Readiness (CFR): Assessing customer readiness for fintech in Bangladesh

Abstract

Financial technology (fintech) has disrupted the traditional financial system by decoupling, decentralizing, and demystifying finance. Effective and scalable adoption of fintech, however, is key to financial inclusion and value creation through new business models. While theoretical frameworks and models in the literature investigate technology adoption in general, a measurement scheme for customer readiness specifically for fintech is absent. We conduct a National Citizen Survey in Bangladesh (N = 1282), review extant literature on fintech adoption factors and variables, distill major themes into seven dimensions. In this paper, we propose the Customer Fintech Readiness (CFR) index to assess readiness to adopt and use customer facing fintech product, platforms and services. We validate the index and establish its easy replicability, albeit with small contingent adjustments. We find that customers in Bangladesh lag behind in readiness for fintech. Our dimension specific scores provide important insights for policy intervention and planning. While our dataset remains gender-imbalanced and depends on customer self-reporting, we delineate ways to fine-tune its construction for better replication of CFR in other countries.