As the climate crisis accelerates and the urgency for sustainable solutions intensifies, the intersection of financial technology and environmental responsibility—often termed "green fintech"—emerges as a pivotal area of innovation and research. A recent groundbreaking study dives deep into the behavioral dynamics underlying users’ continuous engagement with green fintech platforms, honing in on the well-known Ant Forest application. This research not only sheds light on the psychological underpinnings of sustainable digital financial habits but also refines the established Expectation-Confirmation Model (ECM) through the lens of environmental concerns and green trust, offering vital insights into how these green variables shape user retention and satisfaction.
At its core, green fintech aspires to harmonize financial progress with ecological sustainability, an ambition that requires not only technological ingenuity but also meaningful user participation. The study reveals that individuals’ willingness to persist in using green fintech platforms is intricately linked to their environmental consciousness and the degree of trust they place in the green credentials of these digital tools. Environmental concerns—defined as users’ awareness and engagement with ecological issues—and green trust, conceptualized as confidence in the platform’s genuine environmental impact, play pivotal roles in nurturing user satisfaction and perceived usefulness, which collectively contribute to sustained platform usage.
Using Ant Forest, a prominent green fintech initiative dedicated to incentivizing low-carbon behaviors, as the empirical ground, the researchers methodically explore how confirmation—the alignment between users’ expectations and actual experiences—acts as a catalyst for enhancing perceived usefulness. The data robustly confirm that when Ant Forest meets or surpasses user expectations, it elevates their perception of the platform’s utility and satisfaction levels. This confirmation effect subsequently energizes users’ intentions to continue engaging with the green fintech environment, ensuring long-term behavioral commitment.
Interestingly, the study nuances this relationship by demonstrating that environmental concerns alone did not significantly influence the confirmation variable directly. This subtle distinction suggests that while altruistic or ecological motivations prime users to adopt green fintech, they do not necessarily guarantee that the platform will meet personal expectations out of the gate. Instead, users’ pre-existing green trust significantly bolsters their confirmation, articulating the importance of perceived credibility and authentic environmental impact as determinants of ongoing user engagement.
Delving deeper, the researchers elucidate how green trust serves as a dual-force driver: not only does it reinforce users’ confirmation of their expectations, but it also directly amplifies the perceived usefulness of Ant Forest. This means that when users believe that the platform genuinely contributes to environmental conservation and sustainable development goals, they are more likely to view its functionalities as practical and beneficial. The mutual reinforcement between green trust and environmental concerns underscores a cascading effect wherein awareness leads to trust, which in turn solidifies positive appraisals and satisfaction.
The study’s mediation analyses further elaborate on these dynamics, revealing that perceived usefulness partially bridges the influence of environmental concerns on satisfaction and continuous usage intentions. This mediation confirms that green fintech platforms must not only appeal to users’ environmental values but must also tangibly deliver benefits that users find valuable and meaningful. Similarly, confirmation mediates the relation between environmental concerns and perceived usefulness, suggesting that satisfying or surpassing user expectations is vital to converting green motivation into practical engagement.
Green trust itself is revealed as a nuanced mediator in this ecosystem. It partially mediates the effects of environmental concerns on confirmation and perceived usefulness, meaning that trust emerges as a critical psychological mechanism translating initial environmental concerns into concrete perceptions of platform effectiveness and satisfaction. Furthermore, confirmation mediates some relationships linked to green trust, indicating a recursive loop where trust influences satisfaction via confirmation processes.
Beyond psychological constructs, the study innovatively addresses gender as a contextual moderator of green fintech adoption. Through a multisample analysis, distinct pathways where women’s behaviors diverge from men’s emerge clearly. Specifically, the impact of confirmation on perceived usefulness and the subsequent effect of perceived usefulness on continuous use intentions are significantly more pronounced among female users. This pattern aligns with broader sociological and psychological literature documenting females’ higher engagement with environmental issues and eco-friendly behaviors, alongside deeper emotional connections to sustainability causes.
These gender-associated nuances provide profound implications for tailoring green fintech design and marketing strategies. Females’ heightened sensitivity and intrinsic motivation toward sustaining green behaviors translate to more intense perceived usefulness and stronger commitment to ongoing platform usage. This insight disrupts one-size-fits-all paradigms, urging developers and policymakers to consider nuanced demographic factors in promoting sustainable digital financial behaviors.
The study’s theoretical contributions bolster the ECM framework by integrating green personal traits and green trust—dimensions often overlooked in fintech adoption research. By embedding environmental concerns and trust within the ECM, the research extends the model’s explanatory prowess specifically to green fintech, an area where traditional technology acceptance models may fall short due to the ethical and ecological motivations involved. This enriched model better captures the complex motivational milieus influencing green fintech use and holds promise for guiding future empirical inquiries and application development.
Moreover, by empirically validating the distinct roles of environmental concerns and green trust in shaping key ECM constructs such as confirmation, perceived usefulness, and satisfaction, the research paves the way for a more holistic understanding of user behavior in sustainability-driven technological contexts. This extension aligns with and enhances prior works that considered green task technology fit but did not fully integrate personal environmental attributes and trust dynamics.
From a practical standpoint, these findings carry considerable weight for green fintech designers and strategists. Incorporating advanced artificial intelligence and big data analytics can enable platforms to tailor green content and services in accordance with users’ distinct environmental attitudes and trust levels. Such customization could bolster user engagement by presenting more persuasive and credible ecological achievements, enhancing green trust, and reinforcing the path toward sustainable behavioral changes.
Social interactivity stands out as another critical dimension. By embedding social features that facilitate green experience sharing and environmentally focused discussions, green fintech platforms can amplify users’ environmental concerns and nurture community-dependent motivation. Social dialogue about eco-friendly practices may catalyze the general public’s adoption of low-carbon lifestyles and reinforce collective action, essential for scaling sustainability impacts.
Importantly, the researchers underscore that contemporary users harbor escalating expectations for green fintech to decisively embody environmental integrity and transparency. The call for authenticity in sustainability claims dictates that green fintech initiatives collaborate closely with governmental agencies and reputable environmental organizations to co-create campaigns and certifications. This institutional backing not only heightens credibility but also augments users’ green trust, satisfaction, and commitment to continuous platform use. Official endorsements and verifiable environmental achievements can concretize users’ expectations, yielding stronger psychological and behavioral alignment with green fintech solutions.
Ultimately, the insights harvested from this study position green fintech not merely as technological innovation but as a socio-environmental movement mediated by trust, perceived usefulness, and gender-specific psychological dynamics. The refined ECM model enriched by environmental concerns and green trust offers an actionable framework for unveiling the mechanisms through which users weave sustainability into their digital financial behaviors. Coupled with strategic implementations informed by gender-based differences and community engagement, this research delineates a roadmap toward more resilient, morally resonant, and impactful green fintech ecosystems.
In an era where digital transformation and climate urgency collide, understanding what motivates users to sustain their environmentally friendly fintech practices holds the key to unlocking collaborative pathways for a greener, more equitable future. This research boldly bridges the gap between theoretical frameworks and actionable knowledge, setting the stage for green fintech to scale beyond isolated successes into systems-wide contributors to global sustainability agendas.
Subject of Research: Users’ continuous adoption behavior in green fintech platforms, focusing on the influence of environmental concerns and green trust within the Expectation-Confirmation Model framework, with insights from Ant Forest.
Article Title: Environmental concerns and green trust in continuous green fintech use: an expectation-confirmation model with insights from Ant Forest.
Article References:
Lee, JC., Li, T. & Zhang, L. Environmental concerns and green trust in continuous green fintech use: an expectation-confirmation model with insights from Ant Forest. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 12, 540 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-04856-2
Image Credits: AI Generated
