Boosting Sustainability in Healthcare Sector through Fintech: Analyzing the Moderating Role of Financial and ICT Development

Abstract

Healthcare organizations are setting new targets of sustainable practices to improve their financial performance without depleting social and natural capital. Maintaining a sustainable, resilient, and durable healthcare system facilitate economies to achieve sustainable competitiveness. Thus, it is important to address and fill the knowledge gap by identifying factors that improve a firm’s sustainability. Drawing on technological knowledge spillover theory, this study investigates the effect of FinTech development on the sustainable performance of healthcare firms using panel data comprised of 11 Asia-Pacific countries. By applying the 2-step GMM technique, we find a robust estimate that digital financial technologies improve the sustainable performance of the firms. Contrary to the substitution effect, our results further indicate that financial institutions are collaborating with FinTechs to facilitate financing at the individual and firm-level. We also find that financial and ICT development positively moderates the relationship between FinTech development and sustainable performance.

Does Financial Technology Improve Health in Asian Economies?

“…This finding is also supported by Deng et al ( 14 ), who noted that an inconclusive digital financial system supports sustainable development and plays a role in coherence with the social, economic, environmental, and governance. Meiling et al ( 31 ) argued that Fintech encourages countries to achieve sustainable development without compromising social, economic, and environmental performance. Fintech is a modern pillar of the economy in the globe.…”

“…FinTech is also facilitated society by reducing income inequality, providing better healthcare services to deprived income groups, and improving the financial sector performance of the healthcare industry. Our study follows the latest empirical studies ( 28 , 31 ). To detect the impacts of FinTech on health outcomes; we have used the following panel model forms:…”

Benefit–Risk Perceptions of FinTech Adoption for Sustainability from Bank Consumers’ Perspective: The Moderating Role of Fear of COVID-19

“…Consistent with the technological knowledge spillover theory, ref. [9] found that FinTech development improves the sustainable performance of 59 healthcare firms in 11 Asia-Pacific countries. Meanwhile, ref.…”

“…These digital technologies are designed to improve production efficiencies, the key competitive advantage to survive modern, globalized markets. The combination of efficiency-driven property and digital structure makes I-4.0 technologies promising change agents for sustainability [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] and sustainable development [8][9][10]. They eliminate processes and resources that have caused irreversible environmental problems, resource depletion, and ecological imbalances [1].…”

“…To that effect, governments worldwide have acknowledged that I-4.0 technologies, including financial technology (FinTech), must be leveraged to recuperate environmental sustainability by de-materializing production and consumption, resulting in the significantly reduced use of natural resources [2,3,5]. The establishment of the United Nations Secretary General's Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development (UN-SGSA) [4] affirms the contributions of FinTech services (henceforth, FinTech) to sustainable development [9,10]. FinTech contributes to financial inclusion by providing unbanked and underbanked consumers, especially low-income households and minority groups, access Sustainability 2022, 14, 8357 2 of 24 to affordable and convenient financing to help increase their economic opportunities [4,8].…”