Olena Pakhnenko

Department of Finance, Banking and Insurance, 

Sumy State University,

Ukraine

o.pakhnenko@uabs.sumdu.edu.ua

ORCID 0000-0002-4703-4078

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

Pavlo Rubanov

Department of Finance and Entrepreneurship, 

Sumy State University,

Ukraine

p.rubanov@finance.sumdu.edu.ua

ORCID 0000-0002-9415-8786

Dusan Hacar

Faculty of Economics and Business,

Pan-European University in Bratislava,

Slovakia

dusan.hacar@paneurouni.com 

ORCID 0000-0003-4147-4547

Valerii Yatsenko

Department of Economic Cybernetics, Sumy State University,

Ukraine

v.yatsenko@uabs.sumdu.edu.ua

ORCID 0000-0003-2316-3817

Imre Vida *

Hungarian University of Agricukter and Life Sciences, 

Doctoral School of Economics and Regional Sciences, 

Hungary

info@vidaimre.com

ORCID 0000-0001-8089-9703

* Corresponding author

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.

Received: March, 2020

1st Revision: April, 2021

Accepted: May, 2021

DOI: 10.14254/2071-8330.2021/14-2/17

JEL Classification: G20, O33, C43

Keywords: financial services, digitalization, FinTech, Internet banking, mobile banking, electronic payments