Yes, but only as part of a broader financial development strategy. The article suggests both developed and emerging economies benefit from greater electronic payment use, but the mechanism differs. Emerging economies may see faster consumption growth, while developed economies often get more GDP lift per usage increase. Adoption works best when infrastructure, trust, and economic conditions can support it.
Why payment adoption helps, but only when the surrounding economy can absorb it
Electronic payments can improve transaction speed, lower cash-handling frictions, and widen access to formal financial services, but they are not a stand-alone growth policy. In developing economies, the payoff depends heavily on whether the basic payment stack, connectivity, merchant acceptance, and user trust are present. If those conditions are weak, adoption may stay superficial or concentrate in a small urban segment.
For policymakers, the core issue is not whether to prefer electronic payments over cash in the abstract, but whether payment digitisation can actually reach enough users and merchants to affect spending, saving, and business activity. The answer is usually yes, but the economic effect is uneven and depends on infrastructure quality, market structure, and the pace of financial inclusion.
Why the growth effect differs between developing and developed economies
Electronic payment adoption can support consumption growth in developing economies because it reduces transaction friction and makes payments easier to use in everyday commerce. That matters most where the informal economy is large and where moving from cash to electronic methods can bring more households and small firms into traceable financial activity.
In more developed economies, the same increase in usage may deliver smaller incremental gains because payment infrastructure is already mature and marginal efficiency improvements are harder to translate into broad macroeconomic lift. In other words, the benefit still exists, but the main effect may be convenience, resilience, and lower transaction cost rather than a dramatic step change in growth.
That difference means policy should be calibrated to stage of development rather than copied across countries. A uniform mandate to “go digital” can miss the fact that adoption is only productive when merchants can accept it, consumers can trust it, and the system remains reliable under real-world conditions.
What policymakers should treat as the real preconditions for adoption
Infrastructure is only one part of the equation. Policymakers also need interoperability across providers, reliable settlement, low-cost access points, consumer protection, and practical onboarding for small merchants. If the payment rails are fragmented or expensive to use, adoption may increase at the top of the market while leaving the broader economy unchanged.
Trust is equally important. Users adopt electronic payments when they believe transactions will settle correctly, disputes can be resolved, and fraud losses will not be borne entirely by them. That makes governance, dispute handling, and fraud monitoring part of the economic development question, not just back-office security work.
Financial development also matters. When digital payments connect to savings, credit, payroll, remittances, and business records, they can support broader formalisation and productivity gains. When they remain isolated as a thin payment layer, the macroeconomic benefit is much weaker.
Risk and Threat Considerations
Rapid adoption in weak environments can create concentration risk, fraud exposure, and exclusion if users are pushed into systems they cannot reliably access or understand. The biggest failure mode is often not the absence of payment technology, but uneven access, poor outage tolerance, and weak consumer recourse that erode confidence and limit scale.
Failure mechanism: Poor connectivity, inconsistent merchant acceptance, weak fraud controls, or unreliable dispute resolution can make electronic payments less dependable than cash for everyday users, which suppresses adoption and can shift activity into informal workarounds.
Impact: Policymakers may overestimate the growth benefit, while households and small firms absorb higher friction, higher fraud risk, or exclusion from formal payment channels.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
NIST CSF 2.0, NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 and CIS Controls v8 set the technical controls, while PCI DSS v4.0 defines the regulatory obligations.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | GV.SC-01 — Supply Chain Risk Management | Payment adoption depends on resilient providers and payment rails. |
| PR.AA-05 — Identity Management, Authentication, and Access Control | Electronic payments require trustworthy user and transaction access controls. | |
| PR.DS-01 — Data-at-Rest Protection | Payment systems handle sensitive financial and account data. | |
| Recommendation — Assess provider and network dependencies before expanding digital payment channels. Apply strong authentication and access controls to payment accounts and transactions. Protect stored payment data with encryption and access restrictions. | ||
| PCI DSS v4.0 | 7.2.1 — Account and Access Control Principles | Payment systems need least-privilege access to reduce abuse risk. |
| 8.6.1 — Interactive Login for System and Application Accounts | System accounts in payment environments must not be freely interactive. | |
| Recommendation — Restrict payment-system access to business need and least privilege. Prevent interactive use of system and application accounts unless specifically required. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | AC-6 — Least Privilege | Payment platforms benefit from limiting exposure and misuse of access rights. |
| IA-2 — Identification and Authentication (Organizational Users) | Payment operations depend on reliable authentication for staff and operators. | |
| Recommendation — Limit payment-system privileges to the minimum required for each role. Require strong authentication for personnel administering payment systems. | ||
| CIS Controls v8 | CIS-5 — Account Management | Adoption scales only when user and admin account hygiene is manageable. |
| CIS-13 — Network Monitoring and Defense | Monitoring helps detect fraud, outages, and abuse in payment flows. | |
| Recommendation — Inventory and manage payment-related accounts throughout their lifecycle. Monitor payment networks for anomalies, fraud, and service disruption. | ||
Practitioner Guidance
What to prioritise: Treat payment adoption as an infrastructure and market-design programme, not a technology rollout. The first test is whether merchants, consumers, and payment providers can all participate at usable cost and with acceptable reliability.
What to measure: Track active usage, merchant acceptance density, outage rates, dispute resolution times, and fraud rates, not just wallet registrations or app downloads. Those operational indicators tell you whether adoption is creating real economic utility.
Decision rule: If access is limited to urban or higher-income users, focus on expanding interoperability and acceptance before pushing deeper adoption targets. If usage is broad but trust is weak, improve consumer protections and reliability before scaling incentives.
Practitioner takeaway: The right policy question is not “electronic payments or cash,” but “what ecosystem conditions are required for digital payments to become broadly useful without creating new exclusion or fragility?”
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- How should security teams prioritise NHI remediation in cloud environments?
- Why do non-human identities create compliance risk even when policies exist?
- Should organisations prioritise external exposure or internal credential governance first?
- How should organisations prioritise cloud security when adoption is being slowed by skills gaps and uneven controls?
Deepen Your Knowledge
Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on September 26, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
