Introduction
The rapid digital transformation of the banking industry has increased the need for flexible, responsive, and data-driven approaches to data management. Agile Data Management (ADM) has emerged as an approach that emphasizes flexibility, rapid response, continuous improvement, and more effective use of data in strategic decision-making. This approach is particularly relevant to banking because banks are highly data-intensive organizations and increasingly depend on data analytics, digital platforms, intelligent banking services, and emerging technologies. Despite the growing importance of ADM, the existing literature has largely examined data management, organizational agility, and smart banking as separate areas. Consequently, there is a lack of a comprehensive scientific map showing how knowledge has developed at the intersection of these domains within the banking industry. The present study addressed this gap by examining the knowledge structure, major research clusters, influential authors and countries, emerging concepts, and international collaboration patterns in research on agile data management in banking.
Literature Review
Previous studies indicated that agile approaches to data management had expanded across different sectors, including healthcare, education, information systems, and banking. Earlier research emphasized the importance of data infrastructure, agile approaches to big data projects, data laboratories, incremental implementation, and agile methods such as Scrum, DSDM, and Kanban. Subsequent studies highlighted limitations of traditional data governance systems in dynamic environments and examined emerging approaches such as blockchain and Data Mesh for managing analytical data. More recent research has focused on the relationship between agility, stakeholder satisfaction, team efficiency, information management, and digital transformation. In the Iranian context, previous studies have addressed organizational agility in banks, data mining and text mining, smart banking, Internet of Things, and behavioral agility. However, the reviewed literature indicated that these streams had generally developed independently. Therefore, the present study sought to provide an integrated bibliometric perspective on the development of knowledge at the intersection of agile data management, organizational agility, and digital banking.
Methodology
This study employed a bibliometric research design to examine the structure and development of knowledge in agile data management within the banking industry. Bibliographic data were retrieved from the Scopus database using a search strategy combining terms related to agile banking, smart banking, digital banking, data management, knowledge management, and reference models. The search was conducted on March 20, 2025, and covered publications from 1980 onward. After the initial retrieval and screening process, duplicate and irrelevant records were removed. Accordingly, 552 documents were retained for the final bibliometric analysis. The dataset included English-language research articles, review articles, and conference publications that were available in full text.
VOSviewer and the Bibliometrix package in R were used for data analysis, visualization, clustering, and network mapping. Excel was also used to support data integration and duplicate removal. The analyses included publication trends, author and country productivity, co-authorship analysis, keyword co-occurrence analysis, bibliographic coupling, co-citation analysis, and direct citation analysis. The final dataset contained 1,665 authors, with an average of 3.3 authors per publication, an annual growth rate of 12.36%, and an international collaboration rate of 28.08%.
Results
The findings demonstrated a substantial expansion of research related to agile data management and digital banking, particularly from 2019 onward. India emerged as the most productive country, followed by Indonesia, Jordan, and Malaysia. The analysis also identified Amity University, Bina Nusantara University, and Applied Science Private University among the important institutional contributors. Publication output reached its reported peak in 2024, with approximately 200 publications, while the decline observed in 2025 was attributed to the incompleteness of the year and the resulting dataset limitations.
Sustainability (Switzerland) was identified as the leading publication source, followed by International Journal of Bank Marketing, Journal of Financial Services Marketing, and Banks and Bank Systems. In terms of author influence, Yelena Popova had the highest local h-index in the reported analysis. The co-authorship analysis identified Bardia Khorsand, John Soldatos, and Ernesto Troiano as particularly prominent researchers, each having four publications and a total link strength of 35. Other researchers, including Marina Kogura, Ignacio Elicegui, Pavlos Kranas, Dimosthenis Kyriazis, George Makridis, Alessandro Mameli, Jürgen Niess, Kostis Prakakis, and Gisela Sanchez, also occupied important positions in the collaboration network.
Keyword co-occurrence analysis revealed five principal conceptual clusters. The first cluster focuses on digital transformation in banking and includes banking, digital transformation, fintech, financial technology, and innovation. The second concerns emerging technologies and data management, incorporating artificial intelligence, blockchain, machine learning, big data, data management, and cybersecurity. The third cluster addresses customer behavior and technology acceptance through concepts such as customer satisfaction, trust, perceived risk, service quality, and mobile banking. The fourth cluster concerns knowledge management and organizational innovation, including knowledge management, financial innovation, structural equation modeling, and marketing. The fifth cluster focuses on sustainability and inclusive financial development, including sustainability, financial inclusion, sustainable development, and systematic literature review.
The temporal analysis further indicated increasing attention to concepts such as blockchain, digital transformation, banking services, service quality, and cloud computing. The thematic analysis identified banking and sales as central and developed themes, while blockchain and digital transformation were identified as important basic themes. Data ownership and digital platforms were presented as emerging or changing areas of interest.
The country collaboration analysis showed that India occupied a central position in the international research network and maintained substantial links with Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Latvia, and other countries. Western European countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal, were described as contributing particularly to theoretical and policy-oriented dimensions, while Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern countries demonstrated strong engagement with emerging technologies and digital transformation.
Discussion
The findings indicated that agile data management in banking had developed as a multidisciplinary research field situated at the intersection of data management, organizational agility, digital transformation, technology adoption, customer behavior, knowledge management, and sustainability. The five conceptual clusters demonstrated that the field could not be understood exclusively from a technical perspective. Although emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, machine learning, big data, and cybersecurity constituted an important research stream, the literature simultaneously addressed customer trust, satisfaction, perceived risk, organizational knowledge, innovation, sustainability, and financial inclusion.
The strong position of India and the increasing participation of other Asian countries suggested that developing economies were playing an increasingly important role in producing knowledge concerning digital and agile banking. At the same time, collaboration networks involving European, Asian, Middle Eastern, and other countries demonstrated the international and interdisciplinary nature of the field. The co-authorship, bibliographic coupling, and co-citation analyses also indicated the existence of interconnected research communities and shared theoretical foundations. In particular, the co-citation analysis revealed the influence of technology acceptance models such as TAM and UTAUT, methodological approaches such as PLS-SEM, and strategic perspectives such as the resource-based view.
Conclusion
This study provided a bibliometric overview of the development and intellectual structure of research on agile data management in the banking industry based on 552 Scopus-indexed documents. The results demonstrated rapid growth in the field and revealed five major knowledge clusters involving digital transformation, emerging technologies and data management, customer behavior and technology acceptance, knowledge management and organizational innovation, and sustainability and financial inclusion. India emerged as the leading contributor in terms of publication output and collaboration, while researchers such as Khorsand, Soldatos, and Troiano occupied prominent positions within the co-authorship network.
Overall, the findings confirmed that agile data management in banking was an increasingly important interdisciplinary field. The study provided a knowledge map that could support researchers in identifying influential authors, major conceptual streams, emerging topics, and international collaboration opportunities. For banking organizations and policymakers, the findings emphasized the importance of agile data infrastructures, data-oriented human capabilities, flexible data governance, and data-as-a-product approaches. Future research may further examine the development and empirical validation of context-specific ADM frameworks, compare developed and developing banking systems, investigate the effects of ADM on financial-service innovation and bank performance, and empirically explore Data Mesh implementation in banking environments.