ISSN: 2222-6990
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Jordan's Islamic banking sector has deployed AI-enabled digital services at a pace that has outrun systematic evidence on what those tools actually do to customer financial understanding. This paper examines that question empirically. Using survey data from 312 active digital banking customers across three licensed Jordanian Islamic banks, collected between September and November 2024, we test whether perceived AI integration is positively associated with financial literacy a construct that, in Islamic banking, spans both general financial knowledge and understanding of Sharia-specific product structures. We also ask whether customer trust moderates this relationship: specifically, whether the association between AI integration and literacy is stronger among customers who trust both the technical reliability and the religious legitimacy of their bank's AI tools. Data were analysed using PLS-SEM in SmartPLS 4, with Full Collinearity VIF diagnostics for common method bias and two-stage orthogonalisation for moderation. A positive association between AI integration and financial literacy emerged (? = 0.42, p < .001, f² = 0.18), and customer trust significantly strengthened that association (? = 0.14, p = .012). The model explains 43 per cent of the variance in financial literacy. Digital self-efficacy was an independent positive predictor, signalling that AI's educational benefits are not uniformly distributed. We interpret these results as associations rather than causal effects, and discuss what they mean for how Jordanian Islamic banks design their digital tools and how the Central Bank of Jordan frames its financial inclusion strategy.
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