Determinants of Buy Now, Pay Later Acceptance among Baby Boomers in Rural Malaysia: An Extended Technology Acceptance Model

Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) has become a widely used digital payment innovation, yet most empirical studies on its acceptance focus on younger, urban, and digitally active consumers, leaving it unclear whether Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) determinants operate similarly among older adults in rural settings. This study examined BNPL acceptance among baby boomers (born 1946-1964, spanning their early sixties to eighties at the time of data collection) residing in rural regions of Malaysia using an extended TAM incorporating perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU), perceived risk (PR), and digital financial literacy (DFL). Data were collected from 302 respondents through an online and on-site questionnaire survey and analysed using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and multiple linear regression in SPSS version 29. Most respondents (91.7%) had already used a BNPL service, indicating that the findings speak primarily to continuance rather than first-time adoption among this cohort. The four predictors jointly explained 69.9% of the variance in BNPL acceptance (R² = .699, F(4, 297) = 172.009, p < .001), and were associated with three of the four hypothesised paths. Perceived ease of use showed the strongest association (β = .442, p < .001), followed by digital financial literacy (β = .267, p < .001) and perceived usefulness (β = .177, p = .013); perceived risk was not significant (β = .023, p = .503). These results suggest that usability and digital competence, more than risk avoidance, are associated with continued BNPL acceptance among rural baby boomers, pointing to intuitive application design and targeted digital-financial-literacy support as potentially more effective than risk-reassurance or benefit-focused messaging for this demographic.

Buy Now Pay Later; Baby Boomers; Technology Acceptance Model; Digital Financial Literacy; Rural Malaysia

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