Countries Financial Development and Digital Readiness as Determinants of Financial Sector Innovativeness

The competitive position of financial institutions, in particular banks, in the financial service market increasingly depends on the level of their innovativeness. The research analyzes the factors and prerequisites that ensured the emergence and wide introduction of technological innovations in the financial sector of the economy. It let us to find two key determinants of financial sector technologization: 1) technological development of the country - the degree of IT infrastructure development and use of information technologies among the population; 2) financial development - the general development of the financial sector and the demand for innovative financial and technological products, increasing requirements for speed of operations execution, their costeffectiveness, convenience and accessibility for customers. It is suggested to use the Country Digital Readiness Score and the IMF Index of Financial Development as a quantitative assessment of these components. The level of financial service technologization has been assessed using the author's approach to calculating the integrated index by the weighted sum method. The correlation analysis of integrated indices regarding the financial service technologization level, Index of Financial Development and Country Digital Readiness in 2016 provided the following conclusions: 1) the relationship between the financial service technologization level and the country's financial development level is available only for extreme values of these indices, for the rest of the observations there is no correlation between indices; 2) there is a direct link between indices of the financial services technologization level and Country Digital Readiness Scores.