Digital Payment Adoption and SMES Financial Performance in the Digital Era: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Digital payment infrastructure in Indonesia has grown rapidly since the national rollout of the Quick Response Code Indonesian Standard in 2020. Small and Medium Enterprises now form the largest group of digital payment users in the country. Despite this growth, empirical findings on how digital payment adoption affects SMEs financial performance remain scattered across different theories, methods, and country contexts. This paper conducts a systematic literature review of forty sources published between 2019 and 2025 on digital payment adoption and SMEs financial performance. The review follows a PRISMA-based search and screening protocol across Scopus-indexed and Sinta-indexed sources. The findings are organized around theoretical frameworks, antecedents of adoption, financial performance outcomes, and parallel evidence from the mobile money literature outside Indonesia. The Technology Acceptance Model, the Theory of Planned Behavior, and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology remain the dominant frameworks. Perceived usefulness, trust, security, and social influence appear consistently as antecedents, while financial literacy and firm size act as boundary conditions on the adoption-performance link. The review identifies gaps in longitudinal design, cross-country comparability, and formal moderation testing, and proposes a research agenda for future empirical work on SMES financial performance in the digital era.

Keywords: digital payment, SMES financial performance, technology acceptance, systematic literature review, digital era