Abstract:At present, there is no in-depth study on whether underdeveloped areas have taken advantage of the development opportunities of digital finance to improve the quality of economic development and how its internal mechanism works. Yunnan has a short industrial chain, low added value, and shortcomings in high-quality development. It belongs to a underdeveloped and underdeveloped region. Whether it can leverage the dividends of financial technology development to achieve high-quality economic development is a question worth exploring. Therefore, taking Yunnan as the research object, based on the basic logic and literature review of digital financial technology innovation, a theoretical analysis framework for the impact of digital financial technology innovation on high-quality economic development in regions is established from three aspects: regional innovation, income gap, and production efficiency. The entropy method is used to construct an economic high-quality development index, and the Peking University Digital Inclusive Finance Index is used to represent the level of financial technology innovation, And empirical testing was conducted using panel data from 16 prefecture level cities in Yunnan from 2016 to 2020 using a benchmark panel regression model. Research has found that during the research period, the level of digital financial innovation in Yunnan Province has increased by nearly 7 times, and the degree of digitization and depth of use have gradually replaced the breadth of coverage as the main driving force for digital financial innovation. Its digital financial innovation is entering a new stage of deep expansion towards the application end and improving the convenience, low-cost, and creditworthiness of digital finance; The innovation of digital financial technology has a significant promoting effect on the high-quality development of Yunnan, mainly through the mechanism of bridging the urban-rural income gap and improving regional production efficiency. However, the regional innovation support mechanism has not yet formed an effective role. Based on this, from the perspective of stimulating digital finance to empower regional innovation, policy recommendations are proposed to promote digital finance to support innovative financing, enhance the level of digital finance inclusiveness, and improve the market-oriented mechanism of digital finance.