Sustainable financial services: reflection and future perspectives

Sustainability transformations in global financial services aimed at addressing sustainability-related risks have been long overdue and are critical for the future development of financial services. The call for sustainability transformations in financial services arose out of the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goal agenda. The financial services sector plays an important role in providing sustainable financial services to nudge sustainability practices among firms and consumers around the world. However, efforts for sustainability transformations among financial service providers are still slow, and little research has been documented in this area. So far, no bibliometric analysis has been conducted in this area as well. Therefore, this research undertakes a comprehensive snooping review of extant sustainable financial services research in order to establish a trend of existing financial services sustainability activities to enhance future research possibilities. Our comprehensive review of the Scopus database was guided by the PRISMA protocols, including PRISMA-P and SPAR-4-SLR. Bibliometric and content analysis approaches were also employed as analytical tools within an analytical framework. This study has also employed Microsoft Excel and the VOSviewer tool in conducting performance and science mapping analyses. After article filtering for “sustainability” was conducted, a total of 103 research documents published between 1991 and 2022 were identified as usable samples, which were critically reviewed and analyzed in this study by means of content analysis. Three major themes were investigated, including—sustainable financial products, sustainable financial services delivery, and sustainable financial services marketing strategies. Our findings show a recent growth in academic publications in the area, but also indicate relatively low financial sustainability activities around the world. This research therefore aims to provide present and future innovative insights on sustainable financial services aimed at stimulating more financial institutions, financial service managers, policy makers, and academic researchers to take more action toward greater sustainability development activities in the financial services sector.