Financial technology has developed at an extremely high pace and the framework of financial intermediation in most emerging economies has been changed. Fintech platforms are progressively arbitrating retail payments, credit access and online commerce transactions in Nigeria. This paper analyses the interaction between fintech growth, and financial inclusion, and e-commerce development based on a time series and state-level panel econometric analysis. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing, fixed-effects panel estimation and instrumental variable two-stage least squares are used to evaluate annual national and subnational financial indicators. The findings suggest that there is a long term relationship between the growth in fintech transactions and financial inclusion. Fintech growth heightens the formal financial service accessibility considerably, as well as enhances digital payment achievement in online business. Nevertheless, heterogeneity analysis shows that the benefits of fintech expansion are not evenly distributed among gender, income, and geographical groups with rural and low-income populations having weaker effects. The results indicate that despite the fact that the development of fintech has empowered Nigeria through the financial ecosystem, there are still structural obstacles, including lack of digital literacy and uneven infrastructure, which restrict its potential to be inclusive. One of the findings of the study is that it is important to have policies that enlarge digital financial infrastructure, enhance structures of consumer protection and enhance digital capabilities among the underserved populations. These findings help to further the literature on digital financial transformation in emerging economies, as well as to inform policy as applied to other African fintech markets.

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