The Role of FinTech-Enabled Financial Inclusion in Promoting Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

This paper examines how financial inclusion can promote the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through FinTech, specifically in the context of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in Bangalore Urban. FinTech has drastically changed the way financial services are provided through fast technological changes and brought about digital payment services, peer-to-peer lending, and mobile banking to underserved populations. Although there are advantages, digital literacy needs, cybersecurity issues, and regulatory obstacles have hindered its complete use. The proposed research will be empirical in investigating the role of FinTech adoption in financial inclusion, creating MSMEs, and achieving the SDGs, especially SDG 1 (No Poverty), SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), and SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure). The research design was a quantitative one; 80 owners and managers of MSMEs in Bangalore were given structured questionnaires. The SPSS software is used to analyse the data. The descriptive statistics and correlation analysis, regression analysis, and ANOVA were also conducted. The results show that 71 out of the top 100 MSMEs have used FinTech services, and 76 out of the top 100 MSMEs indicate that FinTech has been significant to their business development. The regression results show that 45.4% of the growth of MSMEs is predictable by the adoption of FinTech. Access to credit (0.352) and the use of digital payments (0.318) have the most positive impacts. These results indicate that FinTech has a good impact on MSMEs, financial inclusion, and sustainable development. Nevertheless, there are still issues, such as inadequate infrastructure and cybersecurity. The paper ends with the notion that FinTech is needed to enable sustainable economic development and proposes new studies to determine what barriers to adoption might be present and how the new technologies, like blockchain and AI, can be utilized to improve financial inclusion.