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Introduction
FinTech (financial technology) is transforming the financial service industry and revolutionising the way consumers interact with service providers (Qi and Xiao, 2018; Xu et al., 2020). Defined as technology-enabled financial innovation which leverages big data, artificial intelligence (AI), computing power, cryptography and the Internet (He et al., 2017), FinTech is advancing financial business processes including the provision of services to customers. One-way FinTech is being employed to provide services is through the use of AI to engage with consumers (Green, 2018) and facilitate the examination of accounts, examine consumer financial health and provide financial advice (Mordor Intelligence, 2022). The use of AI in FinTech is significant with the financial AI industry estimated to reach USD 26.67 billion by 2026 (Mordor Intelligence, 2022). The focus of the current paper is to shed new insight into this area, specifically investigating the use of AI to provide financial advice to consumers and the impact this has on emotional responses, perceptions of trust and marketing outcomes specifically, word of mouth (WOM) and brand attitude.
AI involves technology that can process large amounts of data at once and as such can perform jobs originally undertaken by humans such as identifying the suitability of services and products for customer's needs and developing customer relations (Russell and Norvig, 2010; Huang and Rust, 2017; Mordor Intelligence, 2022; van Esch and Black, 2021). AI is more adaptive than traditional static data mining technology, as it learns from a customer's past behaviour (Huang and Rust, 2017). AI has been utilised in a wide range of industries such as Healthcare, Bioscience, Education and Finance (Business Insider, 2017). Although the scholarly examination of AI in service provision is growing through the understanding of how AI should be designed (Blut et al., 2021), its perceived acceptability (Nadarzynski et al., 2019; Ostrom et al., 2019) and customer's trust in the technology (Arnold et al., 2019; Gillath et al., 2021; Glikson and Woolley, 2020; Toreini et al., 2020), the impact of AI service provision in financial services is limited (Mogaji et al., 2022). The lack of studies of AI in financial service provision is an important gap in the current understanding of AI, as a recent McKinsey AI survey reports...