Background and purpose. Iran’s financial technology industry faces three simultaneous pressures: national financial-inclusion mandates, severance from international infrastructure and capital, and the rapid entry of data-driven technologies. Under such conditions, a firm’s survival depends not on mere technology adoption, but on redesigning the logic of value creation and capture. The literature remains divided: one strand treats technology as the primary driver while ignoring institutional context, and another describes context but overlooks firm-level mechanisms. This study synthesizes scattered empirical evidence to build a multi-level framework explaining FinTech business model innovation in the Iranian context.

Method. This applied, qualitative, and exploratory study utilized a meta-synthesis approach following Sandelowski and Barroso’s seven-stage model. Searches in Web of Science, Scopus, and Persian databases (2015–2025) initially yielded 1,774 records. After removing 850 duplicates and rigorous screening, 100 studies were assessed at full text. The main stream yielded 53 studies, and a targeted supplementary search added 3 more, forming a final corpus of 56. Methodological quality was appraised using the MMAT for qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods designs. Coding proceeded at three levels using a codebook with operational definitions and explicit inclusion and exclusion rules for every category.

Findings. The analysis yielded 62 open codes, 22 categories, and 7 dimensions, organized into a comprehensive four-layer framework. The most evidenced dimensions are intra-organizational capabilities and technological affordances (51.8% each); the least covered is industry competitive structure (19.6%). Reliability was assessed at four levels; Cohen’s kappa reached 0.869 at the category level and 0.975 at the dimension level. Sensitivity analysis on 24 qualitative and mixed-methods studies confirmed that no category disappeared, and 15 categories gained higher effect sizes, thereby confirming the robustness of the framework.

Conclusion. Technology in this framework is not an independent cause of business model innovation, but a set of affordances whose realization depends on firm-level capabilities and institutional permissions. This finding explains why relative technology access in Iran coexists with a remarkably low rate of business model redesign. The framework is explanatory and classificatory rather than causal; accordingly, six testable propositions are formulated for future quantitative research.