Financial Saving Behavior in the Digital Age: A Systematic Review of Determinants and Emerging Research Directions

Abstract

Saving is the household behaviour on which financial security, retirement adequacy and macroeconomic capital formation all rest, yet the research explaining it is dispersed across economics, psychology, consumer studies and, more recently, financial technology. This paper systematically reviews the literature and organises it through the Antecedents–Decisions–Outcomes (ADO) framework of Paul and Benito (2017), following the reporting conventions of the PRISMA 2020 statement. A Scopus query covering 2010–2026 returned 2,102 records; 1,170 English-language journal articles formed the bibliometric corpus, and 324 openly accessible articles that engage substantively with household or individual financial saving formed the synthesis corpus. Bibliometric mapping in VOSviewer traces the field's growth, its geographic concentration and its thematic clusters; the ADO synthesis then organises what the field actually claims. Antecedents divide into five families — theoretical, socio-economic, behavioural, capability-and-institutional, and technological. Decisions extend well beyond how much to save, encompassing participation, channel, purpose, and the increasing delegation of decision-making to automated tools. Outcomes run from saving consistency through emergency-fund adequacy and retirement readiness to financial well-being and resilience. Three imbalances stand out: an evidence base concentrated in high-income economies, a near-monopoly of cross-sectional designs, and a technology literature that has grown quickly but remains thin relative to the pace of change in household financial channels. The paper closes with a research agenda organised along theoretical, methodological, contextual and technological lines.