Impact of Education on Green Fintech Adoption: Evidence From the New Sub-Center of Beijing

Integrating financial technologies with green initiatives is critical to the sustainable development agenda. This is particularly true for newly developed cities like Tongzhou, the sub-center of Beijing. To assess the adoption of green fintech in Tongzhou, this paper extends the Energy-Augmented Technology Acceptance Model (EA-TAM) to incorporate two green factors – environmental awareness and green knowledge. This paper applies structural equation modeling techniques to analyze data from 403 respondents who live, work, and/or study in Tongzhou and finds all hypothesized constructs significant. Since green knowledge is significant to the adoption of green fintech, this paper further divides the sample into a high-education group (162 respondents with university-or-above degrees) and a low-education group (251 respondents with post-secondary-or-lower degrees) to evaluate the impact of education. All the hypothesized factors are significant to the high-education group, but environmental awareness and perceived usefulness are insignificant to the low-education group. Hence, the results provide evidence that people in the newly developed city adopt green fintech due to their environmental sensitivity. The adoption of green fintech is more environmentally sensitive for people with high education levels.