Digitalization of financial services in European countries: Evaluation and comparative analysis

Abstract

Constant innovations in finance and technology and different levels of their development worldwide necessitate investigating universal integrated indexes. It will enable a general assessment of the digitization of financial services and allow carrying out a comparative inter-nation analysis. The authors proposed to evaluate the level of digitalization of financial services (DFSI) based on three components: digital inclusion, financial inclusion, and digital financial services. The suggested approach includes several steps: 1) forming an array of input data by eight indicators; 2) establishing the priority of indicators and calculating their weights by using the Fishburne formula; 3) calculating the integral index of digitization of financial services by using the weighted sum method. According to the obtained DFSI values, the European countries were divided into four groups: with a high, medium, low, and critically low level of digitalization of financial services. Countries with a high level of DFSI are considered to be Denmark, the Netherlands, the UK, Finland, Sweden, and Norway. Most countries experience low (Greece, Hungary, Italy, Croatia, Portugal, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Malta, Lithuania) or medium (Estonia, Ireland, Belgium, Latvia, Luxembourg, Germany, the Czech Republic, France, Austria, Spain) levels of DFSI. Critically low level of digitization of financial services is observed in Bulgaria, and Romania.