Why Digital Payments Stick for Some and Fail for Others: A Review of 76 Studies

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the world indoors, digital payments exploded almost overnight. QR codes appeared on street stalls, mobile wallets replaced cash drawers, and governments pushed cashless incentives to keep commerce moving while a virus circulated. But four years after the World Health Organization declared the emergency over, a pressing question has emerged: did that adoption actually last, or was it a temporary reflex that fades the moment the pressure disappears? A new systematic review published in Frontiers in Sustainability tackles exactly that question, and its answer is more sobering than the fintech industry might like.

Researchers Kevynn Delgado and Ryan Ebardo of De La Salle University in Manila synthesized 76 peer-reviewed studies drawn from Scopus, EBSCO, and ProQuest, covering the period from 2023 onward, deliberately anchored to May 2023, when the WHO formally ended COVID-19’s status as a public health emergency of international concern. The cutoff matters: adoption measured in 2021 or 2022, the authors argue, remains confounded by active emergency declarations and mandated restrictions, so it cannot tell us whether payment habits persist once those pressures lift. Out of an initial pool of more than 41,000 records, the team filtered, deduplicated, screened, and quality-appraised their way down to a final evidence base spanning more than 30 countries and four years of post-emergency research.

The headline finding is that the barriers to digital payment adoption did not vanish with the pandemic; they evolved alongside it. Security and privacy concerns top the list, and the numbers behind them are stark. India’s Ministry of Finance reported more than 95,000 fraud cases involving the Unified Payments Interface in the 2022–2023 financial year, up sharply from 84,000 the year before, with UPI transactions accounting for 55 percent of all digital payment fraud in the country. Fraud, in other words, is not a teething problem that adoption outgrows. It grows in parallel with adoption itself, creating a persistent tension that no amount of marketing can resolve.

Trust emerges as the most context-dependent factor in the entire evidence base. In Kuwait, a structural model of mobile payment users found that perceived security has a strong positive effect on trust, which in turn strongly predicts attitudes toward usage. Yet in Jamaica, 26.4 percent of surveyed respondents said they would adopt QR code payments even while believing mobile payments to be insecure, a finding that upends the assumption that trust and perceived risk move in lockstep. In North India, researchers discovered that direct personal experience with cybercrime intensifies trust barriers far beyond what generalized risk-perception surveys can capture, suggesting that a single fraud incident leaves a lasting, experience-shaped scar on adoption behavior that one-time questionnaires systematically miss.

Financial literacy gaps compound the problem, particularly for older adults, rural populations, and informal workers. A study of 25,000 individuals in Japan found that higher financial literacy is positively associated with e-payment adoption, while risk-averse individuals lag behind. In Ghana, the divide runs along formal-informal lines: informal workers cite literacy gaps and distrust as primary barriers, while their formal-sector counterparts respond readily to convenience. In rural India, literacy deficits interact with social norm constraints in ways that app design alone cannot fix. And for small businesses, cost is king: hardware acquisition, licensing, transaction fees, training, and maintenance create a cost envelope that SMEs in Saudi Arabia, Cameroon, and Bangladesh struggle to justify while cash remains a viable alternative. Notably, Bangladeshi users were found to compare transaction fees across competing payment apps in real time, confirming that cost sensitivity operates throughout the adoption lifecycle, not just at the initial decision.

On the enabler side, the strongest drivers are also the most conditional. Ease of use and perceived usefulness reliably predict adoption in some markets but not others; among Indian respondents using QR-based payments, effort expectancy failed to predict intention while habit and facilitating conditions succeeded, hinting that routines matter more than interface polish once a population crosses an initial usage threshold. Social influence carries outsized weight among bottom-of-the-pyramid users in India and in Serbia, where formal information channels are scarce, but is weak or unstable elsewhere. Financial incentives such as cashback programs, fee waivers, and government subsidies, including Thailand’s 50:50 co-payment scheme, clearly encourage uptake, and reward structures appear to boost satisfaction after adoption rather than before it. Demographics modulate everything: younger, higher-income users respond more strongly to ease of use and incentives across Brazil, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Cambodia.

From this cross-study synthesis, the authors derive their central theoretical contribution: the Sustainable Digital Payment Adoption Framework, or SDPAF, a three-tier model that treats adoption as an ecosystem-level outcome rather than an individual technology-acceptance problem. Tier one is the enabling environment, reliable digital infrastructure, mature consumer-protection and cybersecurity regulation, and baseline financial inclusion. Tier two comprises population-specific antecedents, the distinct compound of barriers and enablers each segment faces; urban, high-literacy consumers worry mainly about trust and interfaces, while SMEs and informal operators face compounding cost, regulatory, and security constraints that demand ecosystem-level responses. Tier three is the stakeholder ecosystem configuration, the degree to which governments, financial institutions, fintech firms, and merchants align in complementary, non-substitutable roles. Crucially, the framework predicts that a gap in one tier cannot be offset by investment in the others: regulatory inaction creates trust deficits that no amount of slick platform design can compensate for, and government subsidies mean little without merchant terminal infrastructure on the ground.

The framework yields three predicted adoption trajectories. Durable adoption occurs when all three tiers align, embedding payments into daily routines that survive security incidents and persist without crisis-level pressure. Fragile adoption arises when conditions are only partially met; adoption happens, often crisis-accelerated, but remains sensitive to fraud, cost changes, and incentive withdrawal. Evidence from wartime Ukraine illustrates an extreme variant: cashless use persisted through active armed conflict, driven by perceived necessity and institutional anchoring rather than trust as conventionally measured. Structural exclusion, the third trajectory, characterizes informal-sector operators in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where infrastructure, regulation, and literacy programs are simultaneously inadequate, leaving entire populations effectively outside the payment system.

That exclusion carries direct implications for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The review maps structural exclusion to SDG 1 on poverty and SDG 10 on reduced inequalities, noting that the populations most in need, low-income individuals, rural women, informal traders, are precisely those for whom enabling environments are least developed. Fragile SME adoption threatens SDG 8 on decent work, the infrastructure requirement maps to SDG 9, and the multi-stakeholder alignment requirement mirrors SDG 17 on partnerships. Independent scholarship corroborates the pattern: across 711 Indian UPI districts, merchant network development proved roughly six times more influential than digital infrastructure in driving adoption, and a 61-country panel found that digital financial services improve growth aligned with SDG 8 only where baseline conditions exist, with the effect absent in low-income countries. The Global Findex database still counts 1.3 billion adults without financial accounts, 650 million of them concentrated in just eight economies, disproportionately women, the poor, and rural residents.

Perhaps the most striking revelation is what the evidence cannot say. Across 76 studies and four years, not a single one examines what actually happens to user or business behavior after a real security breach, whether adoption is abandoned, suspended, or resumed, and on what timeline. The methodological profile is remarkably homogeneous: 186 of 245 coded studies are cross-sectional and quantitative, mostly using structural equation modeling, with behavioral intention, stated willingness rather than observed behavior, as the most common outcome. Qualitative approaches account for only 27 studies. The authors call for longitudinal, qualitative, and post-incident behavioral research to test the framework’s fragile-trajectory prediction, especially among the SMEs and informal operators who carry the highest security risk with the fewest resources to absorb a loss. Until such studies exist, the review’s core message stands: sustainable digital payment adoption is not a technology problem but a conditions problem, and where the conditions are missing, the burden falls on exactly those populations least equipped to carry it.

Subject of Research: Post-pandemic digital payment adoption barriers, enablers, and stakeholder influences

Article Title: Toward sustainable digital payment adoption: a systematic review of barriers, enablers, and stakeholder influence beyond COVID-19

Article References: Delgado, K., & Ebardo, R. (2026). Toward sustainable digital payment adoption: a systematic review of barriers, enablers, and stakeholder influence beyond COVID-19. Frontiers in Sustainability, 7, Article 1922801. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsus.2026.1922801

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsus.2026.1922801

Keywords: digital payments, systematic review, financial inclusion, COVID-19, mobile payments, trust, cybersecurity, SMEs, financial literacy, Sustainable Development Goals, fintech, stakeholder influence