Bridging Green Finance and Technological Innovation: A Framework for Accelerating Sustainable Development Through Fintech-Enabled ESG Investment

Closing the global sustainable-development financing gap increasingly depends on two pillars working together: green finance and technological innovation. Yet the literature on green finance, financial technology (fintech), and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment has largely grown in parallel, examined through siloed corporate, sectoral, or single-country lenses rather than as a single connected system. This conceptual paper synthesises that literature into an integrative model, the Technology-Enabled Green-Finance Transmission (TEGFT) Framework, which maps how technological tools, including artificial intelligence, blockchain, big-data analytics, the Internet of Things, and regulatory technology (RegTech), convert green financial instruments into measurable ESG and sustainable-development outcomes, moderated by institutional quality and regional context. Drawing on information asymmetry and symbiosis theory, the paper positions fintech as a structural transmission mechanism rather than a peripheral facilitator. It also introduces the Green–Fintech Maturity Matrix (GFMM), an original typology that classifies countries along the framework’s institutional-quality and technology-maturity dimensions to identify the binding constraint on green–fintech policy in a given market. Five testable propositions follow, with policy and managerial implications for regulators, financial institutions, and firms in developed and emerging markets. The paper concludes with a research agenda to empirically validate the proposed framework.