A Comprehensive Literature Review on the Acceptance of Cashless Payment Methods in Higher Education: From the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to Institutional Realities

The shift toward a cashless society has been significantly advanced through improvements in both financial technology and digital infrastructure. Also important was the rapid increase in the number of digital payment platforms available. Therefore, this literature review will integrate current research examining student adoption and use of cashless payment systems in higher education. Using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) this literature review is specifically interested in how perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived trust, and perceived risk contribute to students' decision to utilize cashless payments. Although there appears to be some empirical support for TAM's theoretical constructs they appear to have varying levels of predictive ability when applied across different technological, demographic, and contextual domains. Specifically, recent studies suggest that as digital payment technologies continue to become widely used and more socially accepted; conventional TAM-based factors (e.g., perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use) will likely diminish in importance relative to other variables (e.g., habit, social norms, facilitating conditions, context) when attempting to explain usage behavior for digitally-experienced users. These findings highlight the potential necessity for researchers to revisit the application of established acceptance models within mature digital-payment environments. The literature also provides an opportunity for researchers to investigate additional factors that can enhance or inhibit acceptance including habits, social influences, facilitation conditions, and contextual characteristics. Overall, the literature review identifies changing trends in the study of cashless payment adoption and provides opportunities to develop/refine existing TAMs for increasingly normalized digital financial technologies. Finally, implications for theory, higher education practices, and digital-payment policies are provided along with suggestions for future research.

Cashless Payment Adoption; Digital Payment; Technology Acceptance Model; Student Adoption Behaviour

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