Behavioural Factors Influencing Retail and Digital Banking: A Comprehensive Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

The fast evolution of retail and digital banking has heightened academic attention on why behavioural variables serve to determine consumer interest in the use of financial technologies. This paper is a thorough bibliometric and thematic review of 331 peer-reviewed journal articles to trace the intellectual framework, research patterns, and themes development in this field. The research analyses the publication tendencies, the most active authors, institutions, collaborative networks, as well as the most popular groups of keywords using Scopus-indexed materials and analytical tools (VOSviewer and Bibliometrix). The results demonstrate that there is significant expansion of research productivity, especially in the last two years, and this indicates more global interest in fintech, mobile banking, digital payments, and user behavioural patterns. The analysis of co-occurrence and co-authorship points to the main behavioural driving factors, including trust, perceived usefulness, ease of use, perceived risk, intention to use, and technological readiness, which are the primary themes on the nature of digital banking adoption. Thematic clusters also suggest an interdisciplinary meeting point of behavioural finance, technology acceptance theories (TAM, UTAUT, TPB), and new financial services such as AI-enabled services, CBDCs, and Islamic fintech. The work is relevant to the literature because it provides a systematic overview of the available studies and points out some most significant tendencies, gaps, and patterns of cooperation. The learnings offer useful lessons to researchers, financial institutions, and policymakers that want to improve the digital financial inclusiveness, user trust, and create behaviourally informed fintech solutions.