Driving Financial Inclusion Through Artificial Intelligence: Examining the Roles of Trust, Security, Accessibility, and Service Quality

Financial inclusion has become an important part of sustainable economic development especially when we are living in the age of rapid advancement of technology. This research paper discusses the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in promoting financial inclusion by discussing the impact of some of the key technological and behavioural factors, which include customer trust, perceived security, accessibility, service quality, digital literacy, awareness, perceived ease of use and technology acceptance. The quantitative research design was adopted and the primary data was gathered in the form of the structured questionnaire from the 676 respondents who are active users of banking and digital financial services. The data was analysed by using reliability testing, correlation and multiple regression technique in order to test the proposed relationships. The results have shown that the adoption of the AI has been a tremendous stimulant of the financial inclusion and has been found to be the most significant predictor of the financial inclusion in the model. Quality of service and customer trust was also identified as critical determiner while critical to reliable and user-centred financial platforms. Also, perceived security, acceptance of technology and easiness of use were concluded to be having a positive effect on the participation in the financial while digital literacy, awareness and accessibility had a moderate but significant effect. The model represented a good explanation power and the robustness of research framework was confirmed. The study is addition to growing literature around fintech with amalgamation of the technological capabilities with the behavioural constructs to offer practical insights for financial institutions as well as the policymakers in their efforts to promoting inclusive financial ecosystem with the help of AI-driven innovations.