Digital Financial Literacy and Sustainable Investment Behavior among University Students

Abstract

Financial services shifted so quickly to digital formats, digital financial literacy has come to play a growing part in how people handle saving, investing, and sustainability-focused money matters, especially young adults just beginning to manage their own finances. Through a quantitative, survey-based setup, this project evaluated how university students across Pakistan connect digital financial literacy to sustainable investment practices. Using stratified random sampling across Pakistani universities, the researchers drew a sample of 320 students and collected their responses through a structured questionnaire that covered digital financial knowledge, online skills, risk awareness, and sustainable investment actions. After testing scale reliability with Cronbach's alpha, the study turned to descriptive statistics, correlations, and hierarchical regression to see whether digital financial literacy accounted for students' sustainable investment choices, introducing demographic and academic covariates first and the three literacy dimensions second. Every digital financial literacy dimension showed a significant positive correlation with sustainable investment behavior, and hierarchical regression revealed that digital financial knowledge, online financial skills, and risk awareness jointly explained a significant, substantial portion of additional variance over demographic and academic controls, led by risk awareness and digital knowledge. These outcomes imply that building up students' digital financial literacy, with an emphasis on financial risk awareness, could noticeably boost sustainable investment among incoming investors, carrying practical lessons for curriculum planners and fintech developers in Pakistan and similar emerging markets.