Cashless payment and financial inclusion

Journal article

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.

Authors: Ouyang, S

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Journal: Journal of Financial Economics
• Volume: 180
• Article number: 104277
• Publication date: 2026-03-24
• Acceptance date: 2026-03-06
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jfineco.2026.104277
• EISSN: 1879-2774
• ISSN: 0304-405X
• Language: English
• Keywords: cashless payment; BigTech; consumer credit; financial inclusion; technology adoption