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

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital payment adoption; sustaining it depends on identifiable enabling conditions. Methods This systematic literature review synthesizes 76 peer-reviewed studies from Scopus, EBSCO, and ProQuest (2023–2026) on the barriers, enablers, and organizational and stakeholder influences shaping adoption beyond the pandemic. Results Trust issues, security concerns, financial literacy gaps, and transaction costs hinder adoption, while ease of use, financial incentives, and social influence drive sustained usage. Discussion The cross-study synthesis produces the Sustainable Digital Payment Adoption Framework (SDPAF), a three-tier integrative model, enabling environment, population-specific antecedents, and stakeholder ecosystem configuration, explaining why adoption trajectories are durable for some populations but fragile or structurally excluded for others, with implications for SDG 1, SDG 8, SDG 9, SDG 10, and SDG 17. The SDPAF frames these factors as interacting tiers rather than independent variables, and predicts that gaps in one tier are not offset by investment in the others. Significant research gaps remain: no study examines user or business behavior after an actual security breach; SME and informal-sector adoption are geographically uneven; and cross-sectional quantitative designs dominate. Qualitative, longitudinal, and post-incident behavioral approaches are needed to test the SDPAF's fragile-trajectory prediction for the populations this review finds least equipped to absorb adoption shocks.