Cashless payment and financial inclusion
Abstract
This paper investigates how cashless payment affects credit access for underserved populations using data from Alipay, a leading Chinese BigTech platform with over 1 billion users that offers a wide range of financial services. By exploiting the staggered rollout of Alipay-bundled shared bikes across cities as a natural experiment and analyzing a representative Alipay user sample, I find that cashless payment adoption increases credit access by 56.3% and that a 1% rise in payment flow increases credit lines by 0.41%. These effects are stronger for less educated and older individuals, who have traditionally faced greater barriers to accessing financial services.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Digital Platforms and Economics
Microfinance and Financial Inclusion
Financial Literacy
Pension
Retirement Analysis
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Journal of Financial Economics
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Volume
- 180
- Pages
- 104277–104277
- Publication date
- 24 March 2026
- Language
- EN