Financial Performance Evaluation of Türkiye’s Savings Finance Sector Using the CRITIC-EDAS Method

The rapid growth of Türkiye’s savings finance sector under Law No. 7292 has created demand for objective, multidimensional performance evaluation tools. This study assesses the financial performance of six savings finance companies in Türkiye over 2022–2024 using a hybrid CRITIC-EDAS multi-criteria decision-making model. Criterion weights for eight financial indicators—spanning profitability, operational efficiency, growth, and financial structure—were derived objectively via CRITIC, while EDAS produced the rankings, which were applied to criterion-direction-normalized data because the dataset contains negative values. The operating expense-to-revenue ratio carried the greatest weight in 2022 and 2023; gross profit margin became dominant in 2024. Katılımevim led the rankings in 2022 (ASi = 1.000); Eminevim then took the lead in 2023 (ASi = 1.000) and held it in 2024 (ASi = 0.968), with Fuzulev second (ASi = 0.815). A normalization artifact affecting two revenue-denominator ratios for one company (İmece) in 2024 was corrected through winsorization. Validity was confirmed in two stages: Spearman correlations between EDAS and the TOPSIS, MABAC, and MARCOS rankings exceeded the 0.89 reliability threshold in all three years, and a nine-scenario sensitivity analysis supported the rankings’ robustness. These findings give regulators, investors, and managers a replicable framework for evaluating performance in this young, underexamined sector and point to operational efficiency and outlier management as priorities for oversight.