The​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌ rapid spread of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) services has been a major change in consumer finance, a case very well and mainly in emerging markets where credit infrastructures are less mature. This paper looks at how consumer trust and financial perceptions drive the use of BNPL in such areas. We based our study on a quantitative-empirical approach and used data from a global sample of a few emerging economies to model the relationships between perceived financial risk, institutional trust, BNPL usage intention and repayment behaviour. The results show that the positive effect of good financial perceptions (like perceived convenience and transparency) on BNPL adoption is significantly enhanced by higher institutional trust. In short, if the person trusts the institution they are more likely to use BNPL. On the other hand, increased perceived financial risk results in the weakening of this path and hence an increase in the likelihood of late or non-payments. Our study reveals that even though BNPL might be a means of financial inclusion and provide some breathing space to the user with regard to consumption, if trust mechanisms are not in place and consumer financial perceptions are not positive, then the BNPL model may result in users being covertly vulnerable. We take into consideration the strategies implications for the BNPL providers and regulatory bodies and suggest the need for transparent communication, consumer education, and risk-mitigation frameworks that are suitable for emerging-market contexts. By doing so, this research serves as a bridge between marketing literature and trust and financial-perception concepts, BNPL adoption model, and practical guidance that platforms can use to embed sustainable growth in environments with varying degrees of institutional ​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌maturity.

Does Widespread Use of AI Recommendation Engines Reduce Consumer Financial Choice Diversity?

Abstract This paper used an empirical approach to understand how the actions and involvement of stakeholders such as government, the private sector, and civil society contribute to the energy injustice experienced by the community. It contributes to scholarship on energy justice in Africa and is informed by a case study of energy injustice in Makueni County, Kenya. The paper demonstrates an empirical approach to appreciating root causes of energy injustice at the local level.
Secondary data in the form of transcripts from fifteen focus group discussions are used in this study. Deductive and inductive thematic analyses are employed on these data. Findings establish that the energy injustices in Makueni County occur in interactions within the community, and between community and other stakeholders such as government and the private sector. Constraints to energy justice include income poverty within communities and limited financial resources in governments, the utility and the private sector. Tensions exhibited between environmental conservation and firewood access which cause conflict in the community and puts them at odds with the sub-national government. Finally, there is limited trust between the community and other stakeholders like government, the private sector and the utility. Mechanisms that can enhance energy justice within the community include communication and equal partnership between community and all stakeholders, inclusion of productive use in electrification programs and increased financing of electrification programs with consumer finance targeting both grid and off-grid users.

Using the 2019 Canadian Financial Capability Survey (CFCS), this study examines whether social equity gaps persist in financial knowledge and retirement savings participation between newcomers and those born in Canada. Compared to well-established immigrants and their Canadian-born counterparts, the results suggest that newcomers have significantly lower levels of financial knowledge and are less likely to participate in registered retirement savings plans. To catalyze actions for better financial outcomes for newcomers in Canada, the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada could consider establishing a Financial Literacy Working Group for Newcomers (like the one for Indigenous Peoples). Furthermore, to reduce the information gap, Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada could add a “Financial Education Courses” category box on the settlement services Canada.ca webpage, which would help newcomers easily filter and find settlement organizations offering financial literacy services.

The insurer generally solicits insurance contracts through insurance intermediaries such as insurance agents, insurance brokers, and insurance salespersons. These insurance intermediaries have distinct legal statuses and different scopes of authority. The legal status, authority, and regulation of each category of insurance intermediaries are prescribed in the Commercial Act, the Insurance Business Act, and the Financial Consumer Protection Act. Insurance brokers are the only insurance intermediaries who mediate the conclusion of insurance contracts on behalf of the policyholder. As a result, they have the advantage of mitigating the disparity in legal positions between the insurer and the policyholder. However, unlike insurance agents and insurance salespersons, insurance brokers are the only category of insurance intermediaries whose authority is not explicitly prescribed under the Commercial Act, which constitutes a notable issue. On the other hand, the authority of insurance salespersons is explicitly prescribed under the Commercial Act. However, questions have been raised as to whether it is necessary to grant them additional authority, such as the right to receive duty of disclosure or the right to represent in the conclusion of insurance contracts. Accordingly, this study examines the relevant laws concerning insurance intermediaries, including the Commercial Act, the Insurance Business Act, and the Financial Consumer Protection Act, as well as foreign legislative examples regarding the authority of insurance brokers and insurance salespersons, and domestic proposed amendments related to their authority. Based on this examination, the study considers desirable directions for amending Article 646-2 of the Commercial Act with respect to the appropriate scope of authority that may be recognized for insurance brokers and insurance salespersons. Through this analysis, it was confirmed that, as there is no statutory provision regarding the authority of insurance brokers under the Commercial Act, there is a need to establish such a provision. Furthermore, considering foreign legislative examples concerning insurance salespersons, it was confirmed that the authority of insurance salespersons prescribed under the Commercial Act could be maintained as is, while additionally recognizing the right to receive notifications of insurance incidents may be considered. In addition, by reviewing the proposed domestic amendments regarding the scope of authority of insurance intermediaries, it was confirmed that caution is warranted in amending the provisions concerning the authority of insurance brokers and insurance salespersons. Based on this, the study proposes improvements to Article 646-2 of the Commercial Act concerning the scope of authority of insurance brokers and insurance salespersons.

Banks and financial institutions in the U.S. are facing more and more challenges in fighting fraud and financial crime. Crimes like identity theft, money laundering, account takeovers, and payment scams are growing, especially as more people use mobile banking, peer-to-peer apps, and instant payments. Traditional fraud systems based on fixed rules can’t keep up with modern scams, which now include fake identities, bot attacks, and complicated laundering schemes (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB], 2023; KPMG, 2025). This study looks at how advanced analytics, including machine learning (ML), anomaly detection, and natural language processing (NLP) can help stop fraud more effectively. We used transaction data from five U.S. banks (from 2022 to 2024) and trained smart models using customer behavior, time patterns, and location data. The results were impressive: Fraud detection accuracy went up from 74% to 93%, and False alarms dropped by 48% New types of fraud (missed by older systems) were caught 70% of the time using unsupervised models like clustering and autoencoders. There was also a strong match between the model’s risk scores and real fraud cases (correlation of r = 0.88, p < .001) (Federal Reserve, 2024). NLP tools were also successful, reaching an F1-score of 0.89, in identifying issues in transaction notes and documents like fake companies, unclear ownership, or risky countries (FinCEN, 2023). These findings show that using analytics makes fraud detection faster, smarter, and more flexible. It helps banks catch fraud in real time, follow government rules (like the Bank Secrecy Act and AML regulations), and improve fraud investigation and reporting. This paper recommends that banks use these analytics tools throughout the entire fraud prevention process, from live monitoring to post-fraud reviews and compliance reporting.

: Banks and financial institutions in the U.S. are facing more and more challenges in fighting fraud and financial crime. Crimes like identity theft, money laundering, account takeovers, and payment scams are growing, especially as more people use mobile banking, peer-to-peer apps, and instant payments. Traditional fraud systems based on fixed rules can’t keep up with modern scams, which now include fake identities, bot attacks, and complicated laundering schemes (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB], 2023; KPMG, 2025). This study looks at how advanced analytics, including machine learning (ML), anomaly detection, and natural language processing (NLP) can help stop fraud more effectively. We used transaction data from five U.S. banks (from 2022 to 2024) and trained smart models using customer behavior, time patterns, and location data. The results were impressive: Fraud detection accuracy went up from 74% to 93%, and False alarms dropped by 48% New types of fraud (missed by older systems) were caught 70% of the time using unsupervised models like clustering and autoencoders. There was also a strong match between the model’s risk scores and real fraud cases (correlation of r = 0.88, p < .001) (Federal Reserve, 2024). NLP tools were also successful, reaching an F1-score of 0.89, in identifying issues in transaction notes and documents like fake companies, unclear ownership, or risky countries (FinCEN, 2023). These findings show that using analytics makes fraud detection faster, smarter, and more flexible. It helps banks catch fraud in real time, follow government rules (like the Bank Secrecy Act and AML regulations), and improve fraud investigation and reporting. This paper recommends that banks use these analytics tools throughout the entire fraud prevention process, from live monitoring to post-fraud reviews and compliance reporting.

Purpose Liberal democracies often experience discrepancies between the envisaged principles of policy about the realities of practice, which leads to a decline in trust and legitimacy. The purpose of this paper is therefore to present a proposed ecosystem for the South African National Consumer Financial Education Policy to address the policy−practice gap better. Design/methodology/approach The study’s methodology is to develop an integrated conceptual framework informed by a literature review and related source documents. A qualitative descriptive design was applied to populate the theorized conceptual framework. Findings Ecosystems provide adaptive resources for value creation in recognizing the interdependence and iterative socioeconomic engagements among the key stakeholders. The holism of the system intends to counter the policy−practice gaps that include: insufficient integration around operational regulations and principle-led policy, challenges in multistakeholder coordination with duplication of efforts and persistent resource constraints. Practical implications This paper contributes to the emerging literature on public policy ecosystems and offers a replicable model for other emerging countries. Social implications The proposed model furthermore future-proofs consumer financial education (CFE) as the model anticipates emerging challenges in digital financial literacy and evolving stakeholder incentives, offering a basis for a resilient and adaptive structure for CFE governance in South Africa and potentially other emerging markets. Originality/value This paper makes a distinct theoretical and practical contribution by proposing and critically constructing a conceptual framework for a CFE ecosystem in South Africa – an original approach not previously theorized in this context. While financial literacy is globally acknowledged as a policy imperative, little scholarly work has offered a systems-level model that accounts for the structural, institutional and stakeholder-specific dynamics within a developing country context.

E-money applications tuition fee loan behavioral analysis using valence framework and technology acceptance analysis.

Can financial consumer protection promote residents' stock market participation? An investigation based on eastern China residents survey

Missouri’s Medicaid Contraction and Consumer Financial Outcomes

Consumer protection in the financial sector has become increasingly significant in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as the state pursues economic diversification under Vision 2030. The Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) has taken a leading role in developing a legal and regulatory framework that seeks to safeguard consumers, ensure transparency, and strengthen trust in financial markets. In recent years, the complexity of financial products, the rise of digital banking, and the expansion of fintech have all amplified the need for robust consumer safeguards. This article provides an academic analysis of the consumer protection regime in the Saudi banking sector, examining legal instruments, remedies available to consumers, and regulatory gaps. While the Saudi framework reflects significant progress, challenges remain, including fragmented regulations, limited redress mechanisms, inconsistent enforcement, and the absence of a statutory financial ombudsman. The article situates Saudi reforms within the wider context of financial consumer protection scholarship and international best practices, offering recommendations to reinforce regulatory effectiveness, operational transparency, and long-term consumer confidence in the evolving financial landscape.

ABSTRACT The rapid pace of financial institutions introducing online loan services has changed the way customers interact with lending platforms, offering a more convenient and faster way to access personal loans. This researching analyzes customer perceptions of online loan services in Tirupur City and attempts to identify the major service quality factors that affect overall satisfaction with the online loan services. The research also examined the influence of demographic variables such as age, level of education, and digital literacy levels on the experiences of customers with online loan applications. From a thorough review of the literature, while there have been many studies on online banking, there has been a lack of research on the online consumer finance market, and especially in developing urban communities such as Tirupur. The study will utilize a modified E-S-QUAL model to evaluate the impact of four dimensions of service quality: efficiency, system availability, fulfillment, and privacy. The findings for the study show that all four attributes of service quality positively and significantly affect customers' overall satisfaction with the online loan service. Finally, there are no significant differences in satisfaction with the online loan service when considering the demographic variables examined; therefore, age, level of education and level of digital literacy do not influence customers' perceptions of service quality. This study contributes to the growing body of knowledge on digital financial services by highlighting the specific factors that influence customer satisfaction in the context of online loan applications in Tirupur. It provides valuable insights for financial institutions seeking to improve service delivery and better cater to the needs of customers in this region. Key Words: Perceptions, Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction, E-S-QUAL and Efficiency

Does investment in consumer finance companies impact credit allocation of banks? Evidence from China

Abstract Small businesses are important drivers of economic activity and job creation but face significant credit constraints. This study examines the joint impact of credit constraints and risk tolerance on a household's decision to become self‐employed using data from the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF), and in a novel way. First, it uncovers and then accounts for the large numbers of households that are truly credit constrained yet systematically overlooked with traditional measures of credit constraints based on loan rejections. Three hidden groups are identified– underfunded borrowers, discouraged borrowers, and priced‐out borrowers– which collectively make up an actual majority of credit constrained borrowers. Second, the study isolates and estimates the independent impact of credit constraints and risk tolerance on self‐employment, avoiding a persistent common omitted variables problem in the literature. The results show that credit constraints and risk aversion significantly limit business activities. The exclusion biases are quantified.

In response to the limitations of traditional consumer-credit pricing models that rely on single-modal demographic and financial tables, this study develops and empirically validates a multimodal intelligent pricing framework that jointly exploits textual declarations, profile images and granular in-app behavioral logs. Each modality is encoded into a 128-dimensional embedding and fused through gated multimodal units and cross-modal attention to capture latent signals of repayment risk. The fused representation feeds a two-stage pipeline in which a deep classifier estimates individualized default probability and a reinforcement-learning policy converts this risk score into compliant, profit-maximising price adjustments. Using 120,000 real loan applications from an international fintech platform, the proposed model reduces mispricing loss by 17 % and lifts AUC to 0.879 compared with the best unimodal and gradient-boosted baselines, while meeting interest-rate caps in five regulatory regimes and sustaining 94 ms online latency. Attention heat-maps and SHAP analyses confirm that pricing decisions remain interpretable and free of single-feature dominance, satisfying emerging AI-governance requirements. The results demonstrate that rich multimodal cues substantially enhance pricing accuracy, fairness and operational robustness, offering a scalable blueprint for next-generation responsible consumer-finance systems.

One of the contracts through which Islamic consumer finance can be implemented is Ijarah Muntahiyah Bittamleek (IMB). This contract is regulated by Instruction No. 224 and Sharia Standard No. 9 of the AAOIFI. The regulatory requirements specified in these documents, especially in Instruction No. 224, are quite difficult to understand. This is due to the fact that this contract, although analogous to traditional financial leasing, differs from it in many respects. Key factors are also the terminology, legal nuances and complexity of the processes specified in the documents. For these reasons, today the concept of IMB has not yet been fully disclosed in the traditional legal doctrine, which necessitates its deep understanding.The article examines the procedure for implementing the IMB contract, including the procedure for transferring/transferring ownership of its subject, and identifies four types of this contract.

Enablers and Barriers to Consumer Financial Health: What Influences Consumer Financial Health?

The aim of this study is to identify how financial literacy impact on mobile banking usage and consumer behavior in the banking sector of Pakistan, with trust in technology as a moderating variable. For data collection, only the users of ten most profitable banks of four cities of Pakistan like Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, and Karachi were included in this study. Partial Least Square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) approach was used to analyze the data, using the SmartPLS 4.0 software. On the basis of study’s findings, financial literacy is a significant indicator of mobile banking usage, which in turn positively impacts on consumer behavior. Furthermore, trust in technology acts as a moderator in this study to strengthen the impact of mobile banking usage on consumer behavior. Policy implications suggest the need for targeted financial literacy programs, enhanced digital security, and user-centric mobile banking services. The study also outlines key limitations, including its cross-sectional design and sample constraints, and offers recommendations for future research, such as exploring additional moderating variables and employing longitudinal methods to better understand evolving consumer patterns in digital finance.

The current study proposed Perceived Risk (PR) as a moderating variable to explore the effect of core Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) variables, namely, Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU), Perceived Usefulness (PU) and Intention to Use (ITU) on Digital Financial Consumer Behavior (DFCB). Through this, the study explained how risk perceptions mitigate or enhance the ability of TAM constructs in influencing consumer behavior on digital financial platforms in emerging economies. Through a structured questionnaire, a quantitative, cross-sectional design was applied and data was gathered through the survey of 350 active users of digital banking services across Punjab, Pakistan. The analysis of both direct and moderating hypotheses was performed by Structural Equation Modeling carried out in Smart PLS 4.0. The results indicated that Technology Acceptance Model has a strong and positive impact on Digital Financial Consumer Behavior (B=0.1883, p < 0.001). Further, the analyses indicate that there exists a strong negative correlation between Digital Financial Consumer Behavior and Perceived Risk (B=-0.2833, p < 0.001). Lastly, the relationship between Technology Acceptance Model and Digital Financial Consumer Behavior is moderated by the Perceived Risk (beta = -0.1493, p < 0.001). Enhancing digital banking adoption depends on ensuring consumers feel secure through clear information, strong privacy measures, and transparent security, beyond just offering convenience and accessibility. This paper extends the TAM model by adding a moderator variable, perceived risk, and creates new knowledge about digital financial behavior within the user of the emerging economies.