Strategic Financial Management in the Digital Era: Framework and Empirical Evidence
Abstract
Digital transformation has fundamentally reshaped how organizations manage their financial functions, shifting from historical, periodic reporting toward management that is increasingly real-time, data-driven, and technologically integrated. This article aims to develop an integrative conceptual framework of strategic financial management in the digital era and to synthesize the empirical evidence that supports it, using a qualitative library research method with a narrative-thematic approach analyzed through explicit stages of coding and thematic synthesis. Through an in-depth review of 29 international literature sources, this article identifies five core dimensions that constitute strategic financial management in the digital era: (1) digital financial technology infrastructure, (2) data-driven decision-making, (3) digital risk governance and cybersecurity, (4) dynamic capabilities and strategic agility, and (5) digital financial literacy and human capital. The critical-comparative synthesis reveals one strong point of convergence digitalization is consistently associated with financial management effectiveness accompanied by cross-country contextual variation, a recurring pattern of mediation by organizational capability, and a methodological tension between the processual claims of dynamic capabilities theory and the cross-sectional designs that dominate the available evidence. Digital financial literacy emerges as a cross-cutting enabler that moderates the effectiveness of the other four dimensions, while dynamic capabilities are positioned as the meta-capability foundation linking the resource-based view to the three technology dimensions. This article contributes an integrative framework visualized through a layered structural diagram that bridges what has largely been a fragmented body of financial-technology research, while outlining a concrete future research agenda for empirically testing the proposed framework.