Does fintech lead to better accounting practices? Empirical evidence
ISSN: 1030-9616
Article publication date: 17 April 2023
Issue publication date: 24 May 2023
Abstract
Purpose
Innovation in fintech presents great opportunities and huge challenges for accounting practices around the world. This paper aims to examine the impact of Fintech on accounting practices including financial reporting, performance management, budgeting, auditing, risk and fraud management. Fintech is proxied by the adoption of AI and big data analysis in accounting practices.
Design/methodology/approach
We chose African countries as our focus countries and surveyed chartered and qualified accountants in both Ghana and Nigeria. With 201 questionnaires qualified for our final analyses, we adopted the structural equation modelling to analyse the impact of Fintech on accounting practices.
Findings
The empirical results show that the impact of AI and big data on accounting practices is positive and significant, indicating that fintech could potentially mitigate the agency problem in accounting practices and lead to better accounting practices. Interestingly, we find that, in general, the impact of AI is larger than that of big data.
Originality/value
Our results provide significant insights to regulators, policymakers and managers about the future development of adopting fintech in the regulation and governance framework at both macro and micro levels for accounting practice.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Authors would like to thank the Editor and anonymous viewers for their constructive feedbacks to improved the quality of the paper.
The research did not receive any fund support.
Citation
Osei-Assibey Bonsu, M., Wang, Y. and Guo, Y. (2023), "Does fintech lead to better accounting practices? Empirical evidence", Accounting Research Journal, Vol. 36 No. 2/3, pp. 129-147. https://doi.org/10.1108/ARJ-07-2022-0178
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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