Digital financial literacy in the FinTech era: A PRISMA-guided systematic literature review

Digital financial literacy (DFL) has become a central capability for households, micro and small enterprises, financial-service providers, and regulators as payments, savings, credit, investment, remittances, insurance, and public transfers move through digital channels. Although the field has grown quickly, it remains fragmented across financial literacy, fintech adoption, consumer protection, cybersecurity awareness, financial inclusion, and development studies. This article presents a PRISMA-guided systematic literature review of DFL. Searches of open scholarly indexes, publisher pages, institutional repositories, and backward and forward citation trails identified 447 records. After duplicate removal, title and abstract screening, and eligibility assessment, 45 studies and policy reports were included in the qualitative synthesis. The review shows that DFL is best understood as a multidimensional and risk-aware capability that combines financial knowledge, digital access and skills, understanding of digital financial products, cyber-risk awareness, attitudes toward responsible digital use, and behavior that converts knowledge into safer decisions. Empirical evidence links DFL to digital-payment adoption, savings and spending discipline, investment participation, use of formal financial services, financial resilience, financial well-being, and microenterprise performance. However, the field is constrained by inconsistent definitions, limited cross-country measurement harmonization, overreliance on cross-sectional self-report designs, insufficient attention to fraud and algorithmic consumer risks, and weak integration between literacy research and product-governance research. The article contributes an integrative framework, a coded synthesis of major antecedents and outcomes, and a future research agenda for management scholars, policymakers, and financial-service organizations seeking to design inclusive, trustworthy, and capability-enhancing digital finance ecosystems.