The Role of Digital Footprints in Determining the Creditworthiness and Sustainability of MSMEs: A Risk-Based Scoring Approach

Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) face a structural financing gap because they lack formal credit histories, financial statements, and collateral. At the same time, the digitalization of transactions, payments, and e-commerce generates digital footprints that can serve as signals of creditworthiness, yet their use remains fragmented and is rarely linked to business sustainability. This study aims to develop a digital-footprint-based risk-based scoring framework that assesses both the creditworthiness and the sustainability of MSMEs. It adopts a qualitative design in the form of a systematic literature review following the PRISMA 2020 protocol, covering 30 publications (2021–2026), followed by thematic analysis and conceptual synthesis. The synthesis shows that digital payment data, e-commerce transaction behavior, and business network relationships consistently strengthen the predictive power of models compared with conventional financial data, particularly for unbanked MSMEs. However, higher accuracy does not automatically translate into inclusion: data bias, limited model explainability, and privacy risks give rise to a paradox of digital financial inclusion. Theoretically, this article extends information asymmetry theory by positioning digital footprints as codified soft information. Practically, it offers a layered scoring architecture that integrates default risk and business resilience