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Internal control systems are critical to an organization's efficiency and promotes the adherence to norms and rules. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of internal control systems on banking industry effectiveness.

Data were collected from 15 commercial and 20 rural banks. The hypothesized relationships were supported by the data. A structural equation modeling was applied in testing the conceptual model and hypothesis. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to establish validity and reliability of the dimensions.

The results show that organizational effectiveness was significantly impacted by three dimensions of internal control systems: control activities, control environments and risk assessment. However, the impact of monitoring of control on organizational effectiveness was not significant. The results also show a nonsignificant impact of information and communication on organizational effectiveness.

Since the current study concentrated on the banking sector with its distinct characteristics, the generalizability of the conclusions may be limited.

The study's findings may aid decision-makers and stakeholders in the adoption, designing and implementation of proactive internal control system to enhance operational efficiency, effectiveness and competitive advantage.

The study advances the literature by empirically evidencing that internal control systems impact organizational effectiveness.

This paper aims to investigate the nonlinear effects of bank regulation stringency on bank lending in 23 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries over the period 1997–2017.

This study employs the dynamic panel threshold regression (PTR) model, which addresses endogeneity and heterogeneity problems within a nonlinear framework. It also uses indices of entry barriers, mixing of banking and commerce restrictions, activity restrictions and capital regulatory requirements from the updated databases of the World Bank's Bank Regulation and Supervision Surveys as measures of bank regulation.

The linearity test results support the existence of nonlinear effects in the relationship between bank lending and entry barriers or capital regulations in the selected SSA economies. The dynamic PTR estimation results reveal that bank lending responds positively when the stringency of entry barriers is below the threshold of 62.8%. However, once the stringency of entry barriers exceeds that threshold level, bank credit reacts negatively and significantly. By contrast, changes in capital regulation stringency do not affect bank lending, either below or above the obtained threshold value of 76.5%.

These results can help policymakers design bank regulatory measures that will promote the resilience and safety of the banking system but at the same time not bring unintended effects to bank lending.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the nonlinear effects of bank regulatory measures on bank lending using the dynamic PTR model and SSA context.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the dynamic asymmetric relationship between financial technology (FinTech) adoption and poverty alleviation on annual data for the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) region over the period from 2004 to 2020.

This study adopted the general method of moments (GMM) method on annual data for 127 countries including 45 countries from the SSA region over the period from 2004 to 2020.

The study’s findings show that improvement in FinTech may initially decrease the rate of extreme poverty, leading to a decrease in total poverty as a percent of the population. While there is an initial decrease in the rate of extreme poverty with improvements of FinTech, once the FinTech index reaches its threshold level of 37.18 points, further improvement in FinTech tends to decrease as penetration increases, giving rise to an decrease in the rate of poverty alleviation.

Policymakers should design more aggressive and comprehensive policies directed at recouping the maximum gains of FinTech adoption, with a reasonable threshold target.

Policymakers in the SSA region must be aware of a FinTech threshold level of 37.18 points. To ensure the highest reduction in extreme poverty, policymakers must keep investing in FinTech to reach this threshold level.

FinTech improvement leads to poverty alleviation. Policymakers in the SSA region can fully recoup the benefits of FinTech by achieving a pre-set threshold level.

This paper addresses that gap in the literature by studying the impact of FinTech, instead of the traditional financial inclusion measures, on poverty in the 45 countries in the SSA region, exploring the potential dynamic asymmetry of this poverty-FinTech link, and testing the presence and statistical significance of the threshold level of FinTech.