Financial Technology And Customer Financial Management In Deposit Taking Savings And Credit Co-Operatives In Baringo County, Kenya

ABSTRACT

Technology is revolutionizing the way that the financial industry operates. Technology has changed all the systems of banks including accounting and management systems as well as how services are delivered to customers. The growing penetration of cellular phones has given consumers the alternative to use digital wallets in environments that are not covered by internet networks. Customers are able to link their cards to their physical traditional wallets on their smartphones and use the smartphone to make payments in remote retail outlets. They can also install applications to send payments to different personals and business till numbers through their smartphones. However, with the emergence of financial technology, customers are faced with the day to day management of their financial data. The main objective of the study was to establish the relationship between financial technology and customer financial management in deposit taking Sacco’s in Baringo County. The specific objectives were: to establish the relationship between; lending technology, payment technology, investment technology and customer financial management in deposit taking Sacco’s and to examine the composite effect of financial technology on customer financial management in deposit taking Sacco’s in Baringo county, Kenya. Economic theory which gives a distinct point of view of examining issues relating to emerging technologies, where business process changes and the financial control theory where the controls are based on freely transferable obligations and rights which assume trust and believe were used. The study used a simple randomized ex-post facto design where the variables that cannot be manipulated in the sense that they affect other variables were selected and analyzed and observations of the relationships between these variables was conducted in a natural setting. In this study, the population was infinite hence the study targeted all the customers who visited deposit taking Sacco’s in Baringo County between 8.30a.m to 4.30p.m during the month of September 2019. Primary data was collected using structured questionnaires. To establish the relationship between financial technology and customer financial management in deposit taking Sacco’s, descriptive statistics were used by way of percentages, proportions and frequency distributions of responses to summarize the data. In order to test the significance of the association between attributes, inferential statistics such as the Pearson Product-Moment correlation and Regression analysis was used. Results from the study showed that there was a positive significant effect of financial technology on customer financial management in deposit taking Sacco’s. The correlation analysis showed a positive correlation between financial technology and customer financial management. This study is important for the government and financial industry players in checking the roles of financial technology on economic development through customer individual financial decision. Moreover the study informs deposit taking Sacco’s’ customers about the recent trends in financial technology and their relationship with control over their financial data. The study also concludes that investment technology significantly affects customer financial management. Sacco’s that intends to increase its customer financial management could invest in improving its use of financial investment technology since it would result in an increase in performance. The study also recommends Sacco’s to increase investment in mobile banking users, and the entire mobile banking technology. This is because the study found out that increase in online banking increases customer financial management.