Major part of African economy such as Nigerian economy has been experiencing high
rate of adult financial exclusion, and poor usage of novel financial technologies. Several factors
have been shown from developed nations to have significant effect on how customers use and adopt
financial innovations. The study investigates the acceptance and use of fingerprint biometric
authentication in an African context. This is critical because of the driving cashless policies of most
African nations like Nigeria and the proliferation of different financial innovations to which a
significant few have gained user traction. The paper is centered on advancing structural model to
fit the African context of fingerprint authentication, and assess how customers’ perception of its
usefulness can have mediating influence on its adoption. Thus, how do customers perceive usefulness
of fingerprint authentication in adopting the device when associated with other determinant factors?
Cross-sectional design was adopted while adapted structured questionnaire was used to pool 311
responses using snowball sampling. Confirmatory factor analysis was carried out while structural
equation modeling was used to prove the hypotheses. Convenience, perceived security, personal
innovativeness, perceived usefulness and subjective norm are the key drivers of fingerprint biometric
authentication in Africa. However, convenience is the key contributor in deepening the cashless
market while perceived usefulness partially mediate behavioral intention. The predictive power of
76% intention to use biometric authentication indicates inclusion of major factors that enables
understanding of the implications while the mediation analysis portrays the value of such factors in
deepening cashless market. Also it is one of scarce literature on deepening cashless market in
African context through biometric authentication. Therefore, it is concluded that in African context
of customer reaction to biometric authentication, convenience has paramount influence while
customers significantly value usefulness as it mediates the relationship of other factors to the adoption
of the innovation.