Blockchain Confidence, FinTech Illiteracy: The Base Layer Is Missing

In March and April 2025, a researcher at the Kraków University of Economics asked 93 people one plain question: do you know what FinTech is? Forty-four percent said no. Another 32% had heard the word but couldn't define it. Only 24% claimed they understood it.

Every one of those 93 people uses mobile or online banking. Sixty-two percent daily.

So here's the uncomfortable leap. If the umbrella term fails - the simplest, broadest label for the whole category - what are the odds people have a working grip on blockchain, AI, or machine learning? The survey doesn't just show an awareness gap. It shows the floor is missing.

The filter that flatters everything after it

Notice what the study does next. Only the 52 respondents who claimed some familiarity with FinTech were allowed to answer the questions about specific technologies. The 41 who admitted they didn't know the word were sent home early.

Clean design - but it means every confident number that follows comes from a pre-selected, already-literate group. And even inside that flattering subset the answers wobbled, enough that the author's own significant chi-square result (p = 0.0450) was carried almost entirely by one anomalous bracket. If the informed subset is this uneven on the easy question, the hard questions stand on sand.

Confident numbers, uncertain understanding

The numbers are confident. Fifty-eight percent named transparency and security as blockchain's main benefit. Sixty-seven percent said AI automates customer service; 52% said it removes the human at the counter. Big Data got personalization, 56%.

Read quickly, that's comprehension. Read carefully, it's something else. These aren't answers to "how does blockchain achieve immutability." They're multiple-choice reactions to a list someone else wrote. You can pick "increased transparency" without knowing what a distributed ledger is - the same way you can praise a technology you've only met in an ad.

Whether respondents understand the mechanisms is a question the survey never tests. It couldn't. It was built to capture opinion, not knowledge. And the author is explicit: this measures perceived impact, not causal impact. "Blockchain increases security" is a belief a customer can hold and a bank can market. Whether a given deployment actually cuts fraud or survives an audit is an empirical claim - one requiring exactly the literacy this population doesn't have.

This isn't a Polish quirk

If it were 93 self-selected Poles, you could shrug. It isn't. The same use-it-don't-understand-it gap appears wherever anyone measures it. The OECD found 71% of adults lack basic digital financial literacy, and that barely half of crypto holders even know their assets aren't legal tender. Most striking: a 2025 study found that lower AI literacy predicts greater enthusiasm for AI - because the people who understand it least are the most likely to experience it as magic.

Sit with that. Enthusiasm isn't a proxy for understanding. Sometimes it's the opposite. The respondents confidently rating blockchain and AI may not be the informed vanguard. They may be the awed audience.

The open question

So the awareness gap isn't cosmetic, to be papered over with an education campaign. It's structural. When 44% can't name the category and the rest recognize benefits without mechanisms, the whole chain - from public understanding to informed adoption to rational scrutiny - runs on trust it hasn't earned.

Which leaves the real question. Does it matter that people can't test what they've already adopted en masse? Or is a system where users defer and vendors decide just... the system we already have, now with better branding?

Sources: Kaczmarczyk, "Wpływ technologii FinTech na innowacyjność sektora bankowego," Studia i Prace KZiF 208 (2026), SGH Warsaw (n = 93; fieldwork March–April 2025). OECD (2025), Improving the Digital Financial Literacy of Crypto-Asset Users. Tully, Longoni & Appel (2025), "Lower AI Literacy Predicts Greater AI Receptivity," Journal of Marketing.