Mid Sweden University

Digitalisation and the Covid-19 pandemic have accelerated the decrease in demand for cash worldwide. This also concerns Sweden, which might be on its way to being the first cashless country in the world. The idea of a cashless society is motivated by various assumed benefits, although it also entails certain inherent challenges. The overall aim of this thesis is to describe and analyse the relationships between barriers and barrier-breakers, respectively, by considering two groups of bank customers, i.e., adopters-accepters and adopters-resisters, and their intentions to fully adopt digital payment methods. A supplementary aim is to investigate moderating effects, because those can affect how barriers and barrier-breakers may increase or decrease the intention to adopt digital payment methods. The thesis includes two papers, one focusing on barriers and the other on barrier-breakers.

An online questionnaire was sent to the two groups of Swedish bank customers, i.e., young bank customers (representing adopters-accepters) and a social media group of cash advocates called Kontantupproret (representing adopters-resisters). The results reveal that adopters-accepters perceived privacy and access barriers to be significantly related to the intention to fully adopt digital payment methods, while adopters-resisters perceived only the impersonalisation barrier as significant. Moreover, both groups highlighted the credibility barrier-breaker, and the adopters-resisters also perceived usefulness and social influence as barrier-breakers in relation to the intention to fully adopt digital payment methods. Additional tests show that bank customers’ past experience may increase the negative effect of the privacy, access, and impersonalisation barriers on the intention to fully adopt digital payment methods. At the same time, the impersonalisation barrier may decrease the positive effect of the barrier-breakers.

Digitalisation and the COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated the decrease in demand for cash worldwide. This also concerns Sweden, which might be on its way to being the first cashless country in the world. The idea of a cashless society is motivated by various assumed benefits, although it also entails certain inherent challenges. The overall aim of this thesis is to describe and analyse the relationships between barriers to realising a cashless society and the barrier-breakers, respectively, by considering two groups of bank customers, i.e., adopters-accepters and adopters-resisters, and their intention/resistance to fully adopt digital payment methods (DPMs). A supplementary aim is to investigate moderating and mediating effects because those can affect how barriers and barrier-breakers may increase or decrease the intention to adopt DPMs. This doctoral thesis includes four papers, focusing on barriers and the respective barrier-breakers, intention, and resistance. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used, starting with an online questionnaire. This approach combined the questionnaire with netnography in one of the papers, while the last paper is entirely a netnographic study. The results reveal that adopters-accepters perceive privacy and access barriers to be significantly related to the intention to fully adopt DPMs. The adopters-resisters perceive only the impersonalisation barrier as significant. Further tests show that bank customers’ past experience may increase the negative effect of the privacy, access, and impersonalisation barriers on the intention to fully adopt DPMs. Furthermore, both groups highlight the credibility barrier-breaker, and the adopters-resisters also perceive usefulness and social influence as barrier-breakers in relation to the intention to fully adopt DPMs. Additional tests show that the impersonalisation barrier may decrease the positive effect of the barrier-breakers. The thesis also shows that the impersonalisation barrier is hard for adopters-resisters to overcome with the social influence barrier-breaker. In a forced full-adoption scenario, this issue seems to cause negative commenting behaviours. Focusing on the access barrier as a repeatedly crucial issue, adopters-accepters may further experience negative attributes such as monologue, uncertainty, restriction, and ambiguity, which may lead to co-destruction of value and, in turn, to potential resistance to fully adopt DPMs.