Financial knowledge, innovation and the digital Euro: a survey-based study

Digitalisation is reshaping financial ecosystems, transforming payment infrastructures, data flows, and monetary instruments into strategic drivers of societal and economic change. However, the effectiveness and sustainability of these innovations depend not only on technological design but also on the interaction between institutional frameworks and heterogeneous knowledge capabilities. This study examines how financial literacy, digital confidence, affective orientations towards technology, and privacy concerns shape user acceptance of an emerging instrument, the digital Euro. Based on survey data from 502 respondents in Italy and using an exploratory methodology combining Multiple Correspondence Analysis and cluster analysis, the research identifies three socio-cognitive profiles: Established Professionals, Young Learners, and Digital-Savvy Young Professionals. These segments differ in how they combine financial awareness, digital familiarity, and perceived risk, suggesting that adoption does not depend linearly on information but on the alignment of capabilities. Across all clusters, privacy concerns persist, signalling that trust, governance transparency, and data protection remain critical anchors of legitimacy. The results provide a capability-based explanation for the uneven acceptance of digital monetary innovations: adoption emerges where financial knowledge aligns with digital self-efficacy and openness to novelty. The study contributes to the understanding of sustainable digital transformation by proposing consumer capability segmentation as a strategic tool for policymakers, central banks, and financial intermediaries. It emphasises the need for targeted communication, literacy initiatives, and ecosystem design sensitive to divergent user capabilities, and highlights human knowledge infrastructures as a core prerequisite for socially inclusive digital innovation in European payment systems.