Effect of Financial Technology on Financial Performance of Deposit Money Banks in Southwest, Nigeria

Financial Technology in the recent times, has significantly intensified competition in Nigerian Banking Industry, hence Deposit Money Banks (DMBs) face persistent pressures from a wide and diverse range of competitors, while the regulatory environment becomes less protective of the financial institutions. This study therefore examined the effect of financial technology on the financial performance of deposit money banks in southwest, Nigeria. The study employed an Ex-Post Facto research design to establish functional relationship among customers and employees of the DMBs branches in the South West geopolitical zone in Nigeria. The descriptive statistics, which involved the current levels of financial performance on deposit money banks showed an improvement in the return on assets due to the deployment of financial technology with the weighted average of 216 or 35.94% while more than 97% of respondents perceive the level of improvement in equities of banks in Nigeria as moderate followed by the rate of improvement in net income margin of banks with weighted mean of 192 or 31.9%. The empirical results showed that the deployment of automated teller machine, mobile banking, internet banking and point of sales on the financial performance of banks have significantly and positively improve banks’ return on asset, equity and the net income. This is an indication that the financial performance of Nigerian banks’ are highly sensitive to changes in the alternative banking channels as 1%, rises in automated teller machine increase the return on asset by 0.18%. In the same vein, increase in mobile banking to the tune of 1% raised the level of return on asset by 0.29%. Thus the study concludes that the deployment of mobile banking and internet bank drive virtually all the indicators of bank financial performance in Nigeria. However, the paper recommends that, the deployment of mobile banking was more pronounced, and particularly in the area of banks’ return on equity although all the alternative banking channels contributes to bank financial performance in Nigeria.