Green banking has become a strategic priority in the financial sector, although the empirical evidence in developing economies is still fragmented and lacks theoretic integration. Centered on the natural resource-based view (NRBV) theory, this paper determines the ways green human resource management (GHRM) practices, green banking practices (GBP), and FinTech adoption (FTA) can serve as complementary capabilities to affect bank sustainability performance (SP) in Pakistan. The SP is a conceptualized higher-order reflective–formative construct that has environmental, social, and economic dimensions. Purposive sampling was used to sample 217 managerial and executive-level employees of leading commercial and privately owned banks in Lahore and Islamabad who had experience in sustainability efforts and digital transformation. The data were processed with the help of the two-stage PLS-SEM, which is appropriate in the case of higher-order constructs, and reliability, validity, and robustness diagnostics were used to prove the stability of the models. The results reveal that GHRM has a very strong influence on SP, and is the strong driver of GBP and FTA. Even though GBP and FTA have a direct positive influence on sustainability performance (SP), the latter is shown to have a relatively stronger mediating effect, indicating that digital transformation brings about sustainability performance faster compared to conventional operational green practices in new banking settings. The results indicate that internal human capital capabilities activate environmental strategies, which, when complemented by technological infrastructure, produce stronger sustainability gains. This study extends the NRBV by integrating human, operational, and technological capabilities within a unified framework and provides context-specific evidence explaining inconsistencies in prior green banking research.
Javed et al. (2026) studied this question.