Advancing Digital Financial Inclusion: Data Privacy, Regulatory Compliance, and Cross-Country Cultural Values in Digital Payment Systems Use

Digital financial inclusion (DFI) is lauded as a panacea for upward mobility and economic empowerment. As such, financial institutions across the globe are encouraged to reimagine their business models by utilizing digital payment systems (DPS) to efficiently and effectively increase people's access to formal financial services and products. However, there are digital technology-related risks and regulation changes, including privacy breaches and regulatory compliance failures, and cultural value differences affecting consumers' and businesses' decisions. This dissertation adopts a three-essay structure to explore data privacy, regulatory compliance, and cross-country cultural values issues in DPS use to advance DFI goals using a range of large texts and secondary datasets. The first essay develops a privacy compliance index to assess DPS privacy protection practices to help against extra-territorial regulatory compliance failures that often hamper DPS growth. The second essay extends the use of the privacy compliance index to comparatively examine the data privacy compliance of DPS entities and the state of DFI across different countries to develop an inclusive financial privacy index. The first and second essays take a design science approach to convey the development of the methodological framework. The third essay examines the influence of cross-country cultural values on the relationships between the DFI relational attributes and user satisfaction to enhance the realization and capabilities of DPS use by a vast population. Finally, this essay takes a computationally data-driven approach to explore the relational attributes and their relationships using user-generated content datasets, and the results are discussed.