Building Digital Creditworthiness: How FinTech-Generated Financial Footprints Drive Credit Access and Business Performance Among Informal Enterprises in Ghana

Raymond Nwinkom Dumeh; Lucy Agyepong

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i05.87179

Building Digital Creditworthiness: How FinTech-Generated Financial Footprints Drive Credit Access and Business Performance Among Informal Enterprises in Ghana

Author(s)	Dr. Raymond Nwinkom Dumeh, Dr. Lucy Agyepong
Country	Ghana
Abstract	Informal Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) in Sub-Saharan Africa face severe credit rationing due to financial opacity, unrecorded cash flows, and a complete lack of conventional collateral. However, the pervasive adoption of digital financial services—specifically Mobile Money (MoMo) networks and agent banking platforms—has enabled informal firms to accumulate transactional metadata known as Digital Financial Footprints (DFF). Drawing on Signaling Theory and the Resource-Based View (RBV), this study provides a comprehensive empirical investigation into how multidimensional DFF influences perceived creditworthiness (PCW), formal and digital credit access (CA), and subsequent firm business performance (BP) among informal enterprises in Ghana. We further evaluate the mediating mechanism of perceived creditworthiness and the moderating boundary condition of Digital Financial Literacy (DFL). Using an interviewer-administered, CAPI-based field survey administered across four major economic hubs in Ghana (N = 400 informal business owner-managers), we evaluate our conceptual model via Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS 4. The empirical findings demonstrate that DFF exerts a strong direct positive effect on perceived creditworthiness (beta = 0.425, p < 0.001) and direct credit access (beta = 0.315, p < 0.001). Perceived creditworthiness significantly mediates the footprint–credit access pathway (beta = 0.175, p < 0.001), while Digital Financial Literacy serves as a key positive moderator (beta = 0.168, p < 0.001), amplifying the credit-signaling efficiency of transaction trails. Ultimately, credit access translates into enhanced relative business performance (beta = 0.485, p < 0.001). The structural model accounts for 54.1% of the variance in credit access (R-squared = 0.541) and 39.5% in business performance (R-squared = 0.395). These findings offer actionable insights for central banks, FinTech developers, and informal business owner-managers striving to bridge the 330 billion USD informal sector credit gap in emerging economies.
Keywords	Digital Financial Footprint, Informal Enterprises, Credit Access, Digital Financial Literacy, Creditworthiness, PLS-SEM, Ghana, Sub-Saharan Africa, Signaling Theory.
Field	Business Administration
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 5, September-October 2026
Published On	2026-09-07
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i05.87179

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Building Digital Creditworthiness: How FinTech-Generated Financial Footprints Drive Credit Access and Business Performance Among Informal Enterprises in Ghana

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