Based on the reviewed established Fintech research, the current study fills a gap in Fintech research, and it will give insights on customers, service providers (banks), and the environment in which this study will be conducted. Firstly, there is considerable growth and consideration of Fintech research among academics. However, these studies were undertaken in the more developed country context, with less focus on the developing countries. Also, to the best of the researcher’s knowledge, the new proposed model is not tested before, and it is the first time that such an approach has been used to test customer satisfaction, loyalty, repurchase intention and financial performance in the Fintech context. This research aims to identify the factors that affect customer satisfaction of using Fintech and thereafter repurchase intention and loyalty, which can be useful to information system researchers in general and in particular Fintech researchers. The study of Sangwan et al. (2019) revealed that the success of any information system especially Fintech is highly associated with consumer behaviour. Prior Fintech research focused solely on customers’ perception to adopt Fintech ignoring the role of customers’ experience of using Fintech (Stewart & Jürjens 2018; Ryu 2018; Belanche, Casaló & Flavián 2019). Despite the importance of the customer experience matter in using Fintech, thus research remains somewhat scant as the focus remained on studying Fintech perception and overall consumer willingness to adopt the service. Moreover, Verhoef et al. (2009) suggested that customer experience research is determined by the outcomes of customer experience. Thus, little knowledge is known on the variables including the customer experience of using Fintech.
For the second group, the customers, Fintech managers require to understand the clear differences between benefit and risk factors associated with Fintech based on customer level of familiarity
with the service and user profile. Knowing the distinction between them enables service providers to capitalize on the characteristics of each Fintech user and effectively meet customer experience and demands. This can be achieved by studying confirmation of expectations that enable to get clarity on the overall service delivery and thereby improve customer continuous use of the transactions and constant loyalty to the firm. Bansal & Taylor (2015) indicated that customer satisfaction and service quality are distinct factors to determine customers’ switching intentions.
As well as, according to Jun and Palacios (2016) suggested that convenience of the service is require to be analyzed in parallel to the service quality as customers’ continuous use of Fintech is doubtful (Ryu 2018), while service providers are enlarging the technology services and expanding the investments. Thus, Fintech providers will not recover the costs and achieve success.
The third group consists of Fintech providers in general and banks in particular. There is an increasing awareness of the impact of technology in services enabling it to become an indispensable strategic choice to digitalize services or use acritical intelligence to advance management practices, leading to positive market presences, business continuity in any circumstances, new revenue generations and customer services improvement. All of these are models of Fintech applications that require a considerable amount of investment to advance the technology infrastructure of banks. According to Stewart and Jürjens (2018) that investment in information technology in firms is crucial; however, it is associated with the risk of return on investment. Hence, exploring the financial performance in this research is a worthy addition to understanding profitability streams of banks and links to customer intention of using Fintech and loyalty.
Lastly, this research is significant to the country in which the phenomenon is studied, in this case, United Arab Emirates (UAE) in particular and Arab countries and fast-developing counties in
general. During the past 20 years, massive economic development happened in the UAE, along with numerous digital transformation initiatives implemented across most sectors, both by the public and government. Across the GCC, banks in the UAE were among the leaders in the field of Fintech adoption. For example, Emirates NBD invested one billion AED to launch the Emirates NBD Future Lab. Also, Emirates Islamic Bank was the first bank in the UAE to support Apple Pay and Samsung Pay as well as “digitize or die” is the bank vision. However, Mashreq Bank has gone step future to launch the region’s first digital bank “Mashreq Neo” using robotics to manage accounts as well they developed Mashreq Pay. In the GCC, banks in Saudi Arabia started to initiate cashless payment methods using technology-boosting digital payment (Deloitte 2019). Hence, there is a huge tendency to invest in technology among financial firms in the GCC, whereby Fintech is likely to flourish in the region.
On the other hand, the importance of Fintech was noticed by regulators in the GCC for example (i.e. the Dubai International Financial Centre, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi) to provide a platform for emerging technology companies as well as create a supervisory environment to aid the development of Fintech. Also, the UAE Central Bank and the Saudi Arabia Monetary Authority have announced plans to use Blockchain technology to issue an authorized digital currency
“Bitcoin” in transactions between two countries (Deloitte 2019). UAE is considered one of the leading Arab countries in technology advancement and digitalization in most of the corporate plus high consumer adoption of online banking a lot of changes have been taking place; however, measuring the impact of these changes has not been done effectively in the scholarly literature of this decade. For this reason, the present research will contribute to the academic work in general and UAE society in particular.