Ms. Kaniz Sakina, Lecturer of Finance, and Shehzad Ahmed, a Finance major student at Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB) have co-authored a research paper on fintech and financial literacy published in the open access Q1 Journal of Risk and Financial Management (JRFM).

Published on September 16, 2026, and titled “Fintech, Financial Access, and Financial Literacy: Evidence from Bangladesh”, the paper examines gender disparities in financial inclusion in Bangladesh. It was co-authored by Dr. Rafiqul Bhuyan, a former faculty member in the Department of Finance of IUB and Professor at the Alabama A&M University; and Dr. Qian Ruby Shen, Professor at Alabama A&M University.

The study examined whether the disparities are driven primarily by differences in formal banking access or mobile financial services (MFS) adoption, and how education and income contribute to these disparities using logistic and ordinal regression, based on 3121 survey responses.

The overall findings indicate that Bangladesh's progress in financial inclusion has not eliminated gender inequality and the remaining disparity is primarily associated with women's lower adoption and use of mobile money.

Published in Volume 19, Issue 9 of JRFM as Article 732, the paper is indexed by Scopus with a CiteScore of 5.5 and a Q1-ranking (2026). The article is available as an open-access publication, available at DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/jrfm19090732

The research contributes to the understanding of the disparities in financial access and financial inclusion in Bangladesh. The main implication is that Bangladesh needs to move from broad financial-inclusion policies toward targeted policies that address women’s MFS adoption, particularly among low-income and less-educated classes.

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