Developing and validating a Cashless Transaction Adoption Model (CTAM)

This research intends to develop and validate a research model for the adoption of cashless transactions. For this purpose, this study was carried out using a two-stage approach. The �rst step in developing the conceptual framework for this study was undertaking an extensive evaluation of the prior research. Second, an empirical validation of the conceptual framework that was constructed in this research to investigate the use of cashless transactions was obtained. The study results reveal that twelve independent variables explained 84.7 percent of the variation in behavioural intention to adopt cashless transactions. In addition, performance expectancy is the strongest predictor of users' intentions to embrace cashless transactions, followed by perceptions of the economy's security and economic offence reduction, social in�uence, perceived trustworthiness, expected level of effort, and innovativeness. Further, in terms of impediments, perceived risk and cost are the negative in�uence factors in�uencing behavioral intention to adopt cashless transactions. Furthermore, this study's �ndings indicate that perceived economy's security ( β = 0.279) was the second, and perceived economic offence reduction ( β = 0.224) was the third most in�uential factor in adopting cashless transactions. These �ndings come from an evaluation of three new independent variables. Therefore, the CTAM has contributed to the literature by comprehensively explaining the user acceptability of cashless transactions. Consequently, this CTAM offers a more in-depth explanation than any other research for why individuals embrace cashless transaction systems.


Introduction
It is wiser to take measures to prevent criminal acts before they occur as opposed to attempting to make amends for them after they have already taken place.Despite the government's efforts to strengthen the judicial system and police agencies, the crime rate continues to climb, making our daily lives more challenging [55].The excessive use of physical cash in a nation is one of the primary factors contributing to this phenomenon.Cash is often the most direct way for illegal activities like drug tra cking, extortion, kidnapping, smuggling, and people tra cking to generate revenue [7,55].In addition, cash transactions are the easiest way for offenders to begin the process of money laundering by transferring the earnings from their unlawful operations into a nancial institution [4].Moreover, it is di cult for law enforcement to monitor cash transactions [19].Consequently, nations with a high volume of cash transactions are likely to have a more signi cant proportion of corrupt and bribe-taking authorities.
In addition, since cash transactions are untraceable, it is easier for criminal organisations and insurgent groups to smuggle funds into the nation and do business without fear of being caught [35].As a consequence of this, even a very small amount of currency in circulation is able to nance a signi cant number of illegal activities [57].Hence, the government must move away from using cash totally if they want to see a signi cant reduction in crime [55].If the physical currency is no longer accessible, criminals will be compelled to continue their business through cashless payment methods.Additionally, all cashless transactions are recorded and traceable.Therefore, as the proportion of cashless transactions continues to rise, the economy will continue to see an improvement in its level of transparency.
Consequently, enhanced transparency would strengthen national economies by reducing nancial crime, robberies, tax evasion, hawala, money laundering, counterfeit currency, and bribery, thus enhancing economic security [55,35,60,20,19,41].In addition to these bene ts, it helps to increase employment and reduce overall government expenditures [61, 55,13].Hence, governments throughout the globe are spending more on infrastructure for cashless transaction systems [13,31].However, the country will not realise the full bene ts of cashless transaction systems unless they are widely adopted and used.
Venkatesh [52] underlines the need to embrace and fully use IT to create bene ts for banks.Consequently, it is essential to research the elements in uencing individuals' decisions to utilise or avoid information technology.Similarly, understanding users' cashless transaction behaviour helps designers and developers build solutions that users will embrace and fully utilise.Cashless transactions refer to making or receiving payments using demand draughts, checks, IMPs, NEFT, RTGS, UPI payments, mobile wallets, debit or credit cards, or other methods that do not require real cash."The proportion of cashless transactions in an economy is referred to as the cashless economy" [41].

Theoretical Background
The relevant published literature reveals that a variety of distinct theoretical models have been constructed in order to investigate the elements that in uence individuals' behaviour intentions in relation to the adoption of new technologies.The following examples serve as some of the models: "Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA)", "Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB)", "Social Cognitive Theory (SCT)", "Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)", "Model of PC Utilization (MPCU)", "Decomposed Theory of Planned Behaviour (DTPB)", "Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT)", and "Uni ed Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT)".The TAM and the UTAUT are two of these models that have seen widespread use in studying people's behavioural intentions to engage in cashless transactions.
The TAM model measures a consumer's willingness to participate in technological activity.It is developed from the TRA model [11].The TAM was explicitly established for the setting of IT, and it is possible to use it to make predictions regarding the adoption and utilisation of IT.The TAM model is a representation of an intention-based behavioural model that has the potential to predict use.The TAM model includes the following components: "perceived ease of use", "usefulness", "attitude toward use", "intention to use", and "actual usage".Researchers have relied heavily on the TAM because of its parsimony, robustness, and ease of use while evaluating various cashless transaction methods [33,18,48,32,25,5,44].
Later on, several researchers in the academic world improved the predictive and explanatory power of TAM by including a variety of new components.For example, Malhotra and Galletta [38] extended the TAM to incorporate facets of social in uence.In addition, several studies have shown a direct association between the societal effect of cashless transactions and the behavioural intent of individuals to embrace cashless transactions [46,6,21,12,39,10].Second, Pavlou [40] devised the TAM to take into account perceived levels of risk.
According to the results, a potential consumer's willingness to participate in cashless transactions drops when they have a greater sense of the risks associated with the transaction.In addition, multiple researchers have shown that risk perception negatively affects the intention to behave in a certain way [46,5].In the end, the TAM has been modi ed to incorporate the concept of trust as an additional component [16].The ndings indicate that an individual's initial level of trust is likely in uenced by particular perceptions and occasionally illogical elements, such as cognitive signals.In addition, a number of studies have demonstrated that individuals' perceptions of trust may play a role in determining their tendency to engage in cashless transactions [6,3,25,44,39,36,56].
Venkatesh et al. [53] proposed the UTAUT by integrating components of prominent IS theories.Four essential dimensions impact intention and use: "performance expectation", "effort expectation", "social in uence", and "facilitating conditions".In addition, the variables of "gender," "age," "experience," and "voluntary usage" were each taken into consideration as possible moderators for this model.In addition, Venkatesh et al. [54] amended the theory by including three additional components and naming it UTAUT2.These new components are "hedonic motivation," "price value," and "habit."The researchers extensively used UTAUT in their investigation because of its more signi cant potential for comprehensiveness and explanation [48,39,44].Subsequently, this UTAUT2 model was improved in cashless transaction systems in response to previous research ndings [46,6,3,56,51,30,21,47].
At present, this enhanced version of the UTAUT2 model offers a comprehensive explanation of why customers choose cashless transaction methods.However, a new research framework is still required to guide future investigations into adopting cashless transactions for multiple reasons.First, the established theoretical models, including UTAUT, UTAUT2 or TAM, are suitable for investigating the adoption of technology like computers and mobile.As a consequence, these theories fail to consider a number of other constructions that might potentially in uence the adoption of cashless transactions.Second, earlier literature includes a large number of similar constructs, which results in duplicating its elements (Table 1).Third, in the setting of cashless transaction acceptance, some of the UTAUT2 assumptions are irrelevant (Ex: hedonic motivation, image, device barriers and so on).Hence, to overcome these shortcomings, this study attempts to synthesise the published evidence on cashless transactions to develop a conceptual framework for examining the adoption of cashless transactions and named it as Cashless Transaction Adoption Model (CTAM).Table 2 explains the evolution of the CTAM, and Fig. 1 depicts its model view.

Research Model And Hypotheses Development
This research performed the rst comprehensive literature evaluation to develop a model encompassing almost all the elements in uencing the behavioural intentions to use cashless transactions without duplication.The procedure for identifying the antecedents of this research model through a comprehensive literature evaluation is as follows: Initially, 110 research publications were evaluated from "Science Direct", "Emerald", "Sage", "Springer", "Taylor & Francis", "IEEE", and "Google Scholar" to determine a research model that encloses practically all the aspects in uencing users' behavioural intent to participate in cashless transactions.Consequently, 63 factors were identi ed within the 110 valid studies.Further, in order to avoid redundancy and overlap, this study classi ed them based on their similarity.Then, from each group, this study selected the most signi cant dimension associated with cashless transaction adoption from earlier studies.Table 1 summarizes the speci ed dimensions and their respective group.Consequently, this research established 14 dimensions ("Performance Expectancy," " Effort Expectancy," "Perceived Trust," "Personal Innovativeness," "Social In uence," "Self-e cacy," "Perceived Risk," "Perceived Costs," "Anxiety," "Perceived Economic Offense Reduction," "Perceived Economic Bene t," "Perceived Economy's Security," "Behavioural Intention," and "Actual Use") to obtain a comprehensive Cashless Transaction Adoption Model.Table 2 represents the sources of the modi ed CTAM model's dimensions, whereas Fig. 1 depicts the research framework.In a cashless economy, audits are feasible at any moment since all monetary transactions are digitally recorded as evidence.As a direct result of this, a greater number of cashless transactions inside the economy would favourably in uence the economy in various ways (Appendix B provides a comprehensive perspective on the matter).
First, there would be a more signi cant rise in transparency in all nancial activities [55,13].Augmented transparency would reduce economic offences such as the number of hawala transactions, money laundering, tax evasion, black money, and instances of corruption and bribery [20,60,19,43,34,55].
Second, it impacts economic growth through the economy's security [41].For instance, issuing counterfeit money would be impossible in a cashless economy, and currency transferred to terrorists via illicit transactions would be restricted [55,60,35,20,43].Additionally, all crimes such as robbery, theft, extortion, drug tra cking, and human tra cking would be diminished [57,50,7].
Third, the elimination of cash from an economy would put a damper on spending in the various nancial sectors [29], reducing the operating expenses of criminal justice systems by reducing illegal activity [55] and omitting currency's printing, supply, and upkeep costs [13].On the other hand, it would achieve higher consumption levels, expand businesses, attract more global investments, and provide better job prospects for those living in the country [13,27,61].These advantages will eventually accelerate economic bene t and increase human development [41].
All of the advantages of adopting a cashless economy are what we refer to as the "outcome of cashless transactions" carried out by every single person.Therefore, since these advantages would promote the stimulation of economic growth and the progression of human development, the degree to which people embrace cashless transactions is also in uenced by their perceptions of the bene ts that nations would experience from transitioning to a cashless economy [41].Accordingly, taking into consideration this line of reasoning, we put up the following three hypotheses: H1a. Perceived economic offence reduction positively in uences behavioural intention towards adopting cashless transactions.
H1b. Perceived economy's security positively in uences the behavioural intention towards adopting cashless transactions.
H1c. Perceived economic bene t positively in uences behavioural intention towards adopting cashless transactions.

Performance expectancy
The notion of "performance expectation" pertains to the degree to which a person feels that using technology will make it possible for them to increase their overall work performance [53].It reveals that individuals are more inclined to adopt and embrace new technology if they feel it will be more valuable and bene cial to their day-to-day lives [42].Similarly, cashless transactions have been attributed to a more convenient channel enabling users to exibly access various services in time and location [37].In addition, a number of researchers in the academic world have investigated the relationship between users' performance expectations and their behavioural intentions with regard to cashless transactions [46,6,3].As a result, we propose this hypothesis: H2: Performance expectations positively in uence the behavioural intention to adopt cashless transactions.

Effort expectancy
An effort expectation is de ned as the degree of ease involved with adopting cashless transactions, as stated by Venkatesh et al. [53].The extent to which the user is knowledgeable, skilled, and ready to put in effort may all play a factor in deciding whether or not the user is willing to utilise cashless transaction services [17].Additionally, people who feel that cashless transactions are simple to use are more likely to be receptive to using these techniques to conduct nancial transactions because they believe it will be easier for them to utilise them [30].Furthermore, an earlier study established a statistically signi cant link between the amount of anticipated effort and the participants' intentions to use the product [6, 51,30].As a result, we propose this hypothesis: H3: The expectation of effort has a bene cial effect on the behavioral intention to embrace cashless transactions.

Perceived trust
An individual's evaluation of the institutional setting from which they get services is referred to as their "perceived trust," and the phrase "perceived trust" is a synonym for "perceived con dence."Further, based on previous interactions or a favourable reputation, this might involve putting faith in service providers, such as nancial institutions and telecommunications companies [44].However, due to unique and forward-thinking services, potential customers lack past and trust-based knowledge [49].As a result, it is anticipated that the rst con dence in a person would be inspired by certain viewpoints and perhaps illogical elements such as cognitive signals.In addition, previous research has shown a signi cant and favourable association between initial trust and behavioural intentions toward embracing cashless transactions [25,44,36,56].Consequently, we hypothesize: H4.The perception of trust positively in uences the intention to engage in cashless transactions.

Social in uence
The notion of "social in uence" relates to an individual's view that other people should switch to conducting their nancial transactions electronically rather than using cash [53].Consequently, early adopters would often inquire about cashless transaction systems in their social circle, and they are susceptible to being affected by the feedback provided by crucial people [17,21].As a result, the behaviour of potential customers is likely to be profoundly in uenced by social in uence to a signi cant degree [39].In addition, several studies have shown a positive association between social in uence and the intention to engage in cashless transactions [46,39,10,36].Consequently, we hypothesize: H5: The effect of social in uence on the behavioural intention to embrace cashless transactions is favourable.

Personal innovativeness
According to Agarwal and Prasad [1], "personal innovativeness in information technology (IT)" relates to the degree to which a person is prepared to experiment with each new IT.Furthermore, cashless payment methods are presently available, and they represent a revolutionary way of making nancial transactions that are technologically separate from traditional banking operations.In addition, recent research has shown that a product's or service's innovativeness signi cantly and directly in uences customers' propensity to engage in cashless transactions.Accordingly, these ndings support the hypothesis that innovativeness is a natural factor in adopting cashless transactions [46,39].As a result, we will propose a hypothesis: H6: Innovativeness has a positive in uence on the behavioural intent to accept cashless transactions.

Self-e cacy
Past research has shown a substantial relationship between computing technology expertise and computer usage outcomes [48,6].In a similar vein, current research in the eld of IS stresses the relevance of an individual's degree of computer self-e cacy in shaping how they respond to IT [36].As a consequence of this, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the levels of knowledge, competency, and capacity that the respondents had about cashless transactions.Therefore, the term "perceived self-e cacy" relates not to an individual's actual talent but rather to their perception that they can engage in cashless transactions.In addition to this, the ndings of earlier studies showed that self-e cacy had a positive impact on individuals' behavioural intentions to adopt cashless transactions [6, 48, 36, 62].Consequently, we hypothesize: H7: Perceptions of self-e cacy have a bene cial effect on behavioural intentions to embrace cashless transactions.

Perceived risk
The phrase "perceived risk" refers to the user's subjective anticipation of incurring a loss to get the required result while utilising cashless transaction services [40].According to Koenig-Lewis et al. [32], customers develop their perspectives on future technology-based products, including risk assessments.Furthermore, several studies have shown that a customer's perception of risk hurts their behavioural intention.It suggests that the willingness of prospective customers to adopt cashless transactions declines as their sense of risk grows [46,5].Consequently, we hypothesize: H8.The perception of risk has a negative impact on individuals' behavioural intentions towards the adoption of cashless transactions.

Perceived costs
The expense of obtaining and using new technology is often cited as one of the factors impeding their widespread adoption.For instance, Wu and Wang [58] observed that the cost signi cantly in uenced the behavioural preference for doing business through mobile phone usage.On the other hand, users may be enticed to embrace digital transactions by decreasing costs [48].In addition, earlier studies indicated that the perceived cost had a detrimental impact on the behavioural intention to adopt cashless transactions [6,18,37].In other words, the greater the expense of adopting new technology, the lower the possibility of its acceptance.As a consequence of this, we shall put up the following hypothesis: H9.The perception of costs has a negative effect on the intention to embrace cashless transactions.

Anxiety
Anxiety may be de ned as a user's fear when interacting with various forms of information technology.For example, "technological anxiety" refers to the worry that one would lose data or make mistakes of essential importance when using technology [45].In addition, the results of previous research on the diffusion of knowledge and technology demonstrated that anxiety plays a signi cant part in determining both behavioral intention and the diffusion of new technologies [39,8,10].Consequently, the ndings of this study anticipated that the levels of anxiety experienced by customers had a detrimental effect on the likelihood that they would embrace a cashless transaction system.In other words, as people's anxieties mount, they naturally lose con dence and acquire unfavourable attitudes against utilising electronic payment methods.Given this, our working hypothesis is as follows: H10: Anxiety has a detrimental effect on the behavioural intention to adopt cashless transactions.

Behavioural intention
Ajzen [2] and Fishbein and Ajzen [14] were the pioneers in incorporating behaviour into the TRA model.TRA's contributions signi cantly assisted in the creation of the TAM.The TRA asserts that beliefs affect attitudes, and attitudes, in turn, impact the character of the intents that control behavioural use [2].Further, the TAM results indicate that behavioural intention is the component of behaviour that can be predicted with the most signi cant degree of precision.In other words, intention is the cognitive process humans go through while getting themselves ready to do a certain behaviour, which is a primary antecedent of that behaviour.Moreover, earlier studies have shown that behavioural intention is an excellent predictor of future behaviour in cashless transaction adoption [11,53,44,39].As a direct result of this, the hypothesis that we shall present is as follows: H11: Behavioural intention has a bene cial effect on utilizing cashless transactions.

Data collection procedure
This study was carried out to determine the factors that in uence users' behavioural intentions regarding the adoption of cashless transactions.Those residents of Bengaluru (India) who engage in cashless transactions were requested to participate in this poll.There were 375 participants from Bengaluru's eight distinct zones who took part in this study from the rst day of May 2021 through the nal day of June 2021.Initially, face-to-face interactions were used to identify the users of cashless transactions in cities, shopping malls, town centres, major retail outlets, hotels, bus stops, railway stations, and airports.Furthermore, researchers explained the signi cance of the study and how they might further the investigation by lling out the questionnaire and providing their feedback.After obtaining the participants' consent to participate in the study, the researcher provided them with a link to the Google Forms questionnaire via WhatsApp and email.All participants were requested to submit their answers within one week or as soon as possible afterwards.
All of the measurements were taken from prior research work that had been published, with only minor adjustments made to accommodate the objectives of this analysis.Further, on a "seven-point Likert scale," each item was rated from one to seven, with one indicating "strong disagreement" and seven indicating "strong agreement".Additionally, as a part of this procedure, we disseminated the questionnaire to subject matter experts and solicited their opinion about the consistency, appropriateness, logic, and clarity of the questions included within each construct.After consultation with subject matter experts, the researchers decreased the length of the questionnaire to 60 questions without sacri cing depth.Further, the authors conducted a pilot study using the revised questionnaire to reduce the possibility of biased responses.To meet this target, the questionnaire was sent to 80 respondents in Bangalore, India, using the URL provided by Google Forms, and the respondents were asked for their responses.Furthermore, the authors received answers from 52 out of 80 respondents and learned from the participants that the reactions were di cult to comprehend and made changes to make them more precise.In addition, the authors carried out a preliminary test using this revised questionnaire.At this point, the respondents could nish lling out the questionnaire without encountering any obstacles.Consequently, the authors con rmed that this questionnaire would be used for the nal data collection cycle.

Methodology
This research analysed the associations between latent components using a "structural equation modelling (SEM)" approach based on "partial least squares (PLS-SEM)".For this reason, the analysis was examined in two distinct stages, one after the other.In the rst step of this process, a "structural equation modelling" (SEM) analysis was carried out in order to investigate the connections that exist between the observable and latent variables that are part of the measurement model.Second, the PLS approach was also utilised to examine the structural model's latent components and relationships.

Measurement model assessment
It is vital to rst study the assessment that is supplied by the measurement model before moving on to the next step of analysing the assumptions that are included into the structural model.An examination of the measurement model is carried out in order to ascertain the precision of the measurements and the extent to which they are able to re ect the theoretical features faithfully.Investigation of the accuracy and dependability of the measuring model comes right from the beginning.According to the ndings, Cronbach's alpha values ranged from 0.848 to 0.961, which is much more than the cut-off value of 0.7 that is recommended for determining statistical signi cance [22] (Table 3).In addition, the values of the "composite reliability (CR)" ranged from 0.896 all the way up to 0.970, which is a substantial increase above the minimum requirement of 0.7 (Table 3).Consequently, the values for Cronbach's Alpha and CR reveal that it can rely on the dependability of internal consistency.
The term "convergent validity (CV)" refers to an evaluation in which several variables have a conceptual link.The factor loadings and the "average variance extracted" (AVE) were examined and presented to achieve this objective.As can be seen in Table 3, the factor loading values for each item are all higher than the recommended minimum threshold of 0.70 [22].In addition, the values of AVE varied from 0.614 to 0.866, which is greater than the tolerable threshold of 0.5.Therefore, CV has been ascertained to exist as a result of these ndings.
Further, the way of establishing discriminant validity is to compare the square roots of the AVEs and the correlation coe cient amongst each component [15].Table 4 demonstrates that AVEs have a more substantial discriminant validity than correlation coe cients, which indicates that the scales have a more remarkable capacity to differentiate between various groups than the correlation coe cients do.Moreover, there was no evidence of multicollinearity based on the "variance in ation factor (VIF)", which assesses the degree to which one independent variable is associated with the other independent variables.A VIF score of less than or equal to 10 indicates that multicollinearity in the data is very infrequent (Table 3).

Structural model assessment
The structural model is intended to be a representation of the assumed paths of the study framework.Consequently, the values of R 2 and Q 2 , as well as the relevance of the paths, are employed in order to assess a structural model.In addition, in order for a model to be regarded as remarkable, the R 2 value of the dependent variable must be larger than or equal to 0.1.Furthermore, for a model to be regarded as outstanding, the strength of each structural route must be larger than or equal to 0.1.[24].The ndings are summarised in Table 5, which demonstrates that every R 2 value is more than 0.1.As a direct consequence of this, the capacity for prediction is strengthened.
Additionally, the value of Q 2 indicates the predictive relevance of the endogenous components, and a value of Q 2 greater than 0 indicates that the model is relevant from a predictive standpoint.Consequently, the ndings imply that the constructs have a signi cant amount of predictability (Table 5).In the end, the SRMR method was used in order to determine how well the model matched the data.In comparison to the baseline, the SRMR was 0.057, which is less than the necessary value of 0.10 and shows an acceptable degree of model t [23].

Discussion
This study aims to develop and validate a research model for adopting cashless transactions.In order to accomplish this goal, the research for this study was carried out in two stages.An exhaustive examination of existing research was the rst stage in constructing the conceptual framework for this investigation.As a consequence of this study, 14 dimensions have been established to explore the adoption of cashless transactions ("Performance Expectancy," "Effort Expectancy," "Perceived Trust," "Personal Innovativeness," "Social In uence," "Self-e cacy," "Perceived Risk," "Perceived Costs," "Anxiety," "Perceived Economic Offense Reduction," "Perceived Economic Bene t," "Perceived Economy's Security," "Behavioural Intention," and "Actual Use").These 14 dimensions cover practically every dimension without overlapping with any other dimensions.In the second stage, this conceptual framework was empirically validated in the context of cashless transaction adoption.Further, the discussions of the observed results will serve as the foundation for the subsequent subsections.
6.1.The in uence of perceived economic offence reduction on a behavioural intention This study's ndings indicate that perceived economic offence reduction had a favourable and substantial effect on individuals' intention to utilise cashless transactions.These ndings align with those found in its previous investigation [41].It explains that individuals are more inclined to adopt and embrace cashless transactions if they believe it would reduce economic offences such as hawala transactions, money laundering, tax evasion, black money, corruption, and bribery.Therefore, governments, policymakers, bank o cials, and other developers of cashless payment systems must enhance their public education efforts to raise awareness of the cashless economy process.

The in uence of perceived economic bene t on behavioural intention
This research that individuals' views of the economic bene ts have positive relations but no impact on intentions to adopt cashless transactions.This result goes against what was found in the earlier research [41].This observation indicates that both the high and low cashless transaction users accept the bene ts of a cashless economy.Further, most of the respondents here have not changed their views about conducting cashless transactions by claiming that a cashless economy is not bene cial to the economy.Therefore, users' perception of economic bene ts doesn't impact their behavioural intention to use cashless transactions.

The in uence of perceived economy's security on behavioural intention
The ndings of this research indicate that individuals' perceptions of the economy's security have a signi cant and positive impact on their behavioural intentions towards adopting cashless transactions.These results are consistent with those reported in its earlier examination [41].This observation suggests that individuals increasingly prefer to conduct their money transactions using a cashless mode out of concern for the economy's security.Besides, our researchers also observed that individuals avoid using physical currency to protect themselves from being victimised by counterfeit currency or having their money stolen.Moreover, the most of individuals are hesitant to accept larger denomination money notes from others, and they do not carry large sums of cash with them, particularly while travelling.

The in uence of performance on behavioural intention
This study that performance expectations are the most important predictor of behavioral intentions to embrace cashless transactions.This nding is in line with the ndings of a previous investigation that was carried out in a number of different settings [17, 46, 6, 3, 30, 21, 12, 9, 10; 56].It indicates that individuals are more likely to be motivated to use and accept cashless transactions if they feel it would bene t their day-to-day lives.Therefore, the developers of cashless payment systems should focus on building cashless payment apps capable of increasing the performance of the transactions that users of cashless payment systems conduct.

The in uence of effort expectations on behavioural intention
The results revealed that behavioural intention to employ cashless transactions is signi cantly in uenced in a favourable way by individuals' expectations about the amount of effort required to conduct cashless transactions.This outcome is consistent with earlier research ndings [12,21,51].It implies that the behavioural intention to use cashless transaction systems is proportional to how easy it is to use such techniques.The easier it is to use cashless transaction systems, the greater the tendency to use such methods.Therefore, developers of cashless payment systems have an obligation to make an effort to produce cashless payment apps that are appealing to users and easy to use in order to keep the positive purpose of cashless transactions alive and well.

The in uence of perceived trust on behavioural intention
This study's ndings indicate a substantial positive association between the level of perceived trust and behavioural intentions towards adopting cashless transactions.In a similar vein, this conclusion is consistent with the ndings discovered in earlier research [3,25,44,36,56].It observed that the favourable behavioural intention to adopt cashless transaction systems was proportional to the trustworthiness of the cashless transaction system.Therefore, service providers of cashless transactions should constantly develop con dence in the cashless payment apps being utilised to preserve the favourable behavioural intention of cashless transaction users.

The in uence of social in uence on behavioural intention
The ndings suggested that social in uence had a favourable effect on individuals' behavioural intentions concerning the use of cashless transactions.This conclusion agrees with the results of the research done by earlier authors [46, 6; 30, 21, 12, 39, 10, 36, 56].It indicates that people construct intentions to use cashless transactions because they assume that their referents, such as family, friends, and neighbours, think everyone should use cashless transactions.
6.8.The in uence of personal innovativeness on behavioural intention Further, this study indicates that personal innovativeness signi cantly in uences individuals' regarding adopting cashless transactions.The prior research ndings are consistent with this observation [17,5,59].Therefore, those who are more forward-thinking concerning the use of information technology will have a higher inclination to adopt cashless transactions.
6.9.The in uence of self-e cacy on behavioural intention The research indicates that self-e cacy has favourable implications on behavioural intention to use cashless transactions, even though these effects are statistically insigni cant.This outcome contradicts the previous investigations [36,17,59].This observation suggests that everyone wants to adopt new technologies to use cashless transactions, no one is opposed to them, and most individuals feel they are capable of making cashless transactions.

The in uence of perceived risk on behavioural intention
The results this study indicate that a user's perception of risk has a negative and signi cant in uence on their behavioural intention to adopt cashless transactions.This observation is supported by the results of a previous study, which is compatible with the conclusion [46,5].This observation suggests that individuals engaging in cashless transactions are aware of the potential risks involved in the payment process.Further, potential users' willingness to engage in cashless transactions declined as their perception of the associated risks grew.Therefore, service providers are required to identify the most signi cant hazards that tend to increase users' worries by employing input from users.Furthermore, they must determine the most effective method for reducing the impact of these worries.

The in uence of perceived costs on behavioural intention
The ndings of this research show that the behavioural intention to use cashless transactions is signi cantly affected in a negative way by the perception of how much it costs to make such transactions.In addition, the ndings of this study are in accordance with the results derived from earlier research [6,18,25,37].It explains that the intention of user behaviour would decrease in response to an increase in the cost of the gadget and internet fees.Therefore, the developers of cashless payment systems should concentrate on designing cashless payment apps that perform precisely on all kinds of devices to offer equal opportunities for all users of cashless transactions, regardless of the cost of the device.

The in uence of anxiety on behavioural intention
This research that users' sense anxiety has a statistically insigni cant and negative association with their behavioural intention to embrace cashless transactions.These ndings contradict the earlier studies [39,10].The observation reveals that most respondents, including the high and low cashless transaction users, did not exhibit anxiety as an impediment to using cashless transactions.They have a great deal of experience working with many kinds of technologies.Therefore, the CTAM has contributed to the literature by comprehensively explaining the user acceptability of cashless transactions.Consequently, this CTAM offers a more in-depth explanation than any other research for why individuals embrace cashless transaction systems.

Research And Practical Implications
The research model used in this study provides an exhaustive explanation of the aspects that in uence individuals' willingness to engage in cashless transactions.However, the role of the moderators' and mediators' effects in this study paradigm is unexplained.The moderators and mediators play an essential role in controlling the in uence of independent variables on dependent variables.
Consequently, this study recommends that future research examine the inclusion of mediators and moderators in this CTAM.Further, this CTAM accounts for individuals' perceived countries' advantages of the cashless economy to investigate factors in uencing the acceptance of cashless transactions.Hence, this CTAM is ideal for conducting studies in the leading cashless nations throughout the globe.
In terms of the practical implications of this research, the rst thing that it does is quantify the elements that in uence the adoption of cashless transaction methods.These ndings would enhance policymakers' and bankers' understanding of the in uence of these factors on the development of infrastructure for cashless transactions.In addition, the results provided here will enhance the knowledge of the developers of applications for cashless transactions by enabling them to consider these challenges when creating cashless transaction applications.In particular, application developers ought to centre their efforts on developing cashless transaction apps that are compatible with a variety of devices, boost the speed of payment transactions, are simple to use, and are socially responsible so that people will continue to use cashless transaction systems.In addition, those in charge of making decisions at banks need to organise awareness programmes in order to teach people who use cashless transaction systems about the potential dangers that might arise from improperly utilising these systems.Additionally, suppliers of cashless transaction services must guarantee that the channels for cashless transactions can conduct nancial transactions securely and effectively at any time and in any location.

Conclusion And Limitations
Governments worldwide are investing massive amounts in infrastructure for a cashless economy.In order to accomplish this goal, banks and other service providers are currently developing various tactics and programmes to improve several different payment methods.
However, until individuals accept and employ cashless transaction systems on a large scale, the nation will not be able to reap the full bene ts of these technologies.According to the BIS (Bank for International Settlements) Statistics Explorer 2020, most nations, especially emerging and undeveloped countries, have a very low per capita volume of cashless transactions except for a few a uent nations.It reveals that cashless transaction acceptance rates in most countries are still in their infancy, with lots of room for growth.Therefore, in order to implement strategies and tactics to increase the adoption of cashless transactions among populations, all stakeholders, bankers, policymakers, and other service providers must rst understand the current users of cashless transaction systems in terms of the factors that in uence their behavioural intentions to use of cashless transactions.For this purpose, academics worldwide seek a comprehensive theoretical research model to explain and predict behavioural intent leading to the adoption of cashless transactions.However, since there is no grounded theory in the eld of cashless transaction acceptance, this research has developed and validated a Cashless Transaction Adoption Model (CTAM).According to the ndings of this CTAM, twelve independent variables explain 84.7 percent of the variance in a person's behavioural intention to embrace cashless transactions.Further, as prior research has shown [53,6], performance expectancy is the strongest predictor of cashless transaction users' intention to use the cashless transaction system, as these ndings also demonstrate the same.Furthermore, perceptions of the economy's security and economic offence reduction are the second and third largest predictors of users' intentions to embrace cashless transactions, followed by social in uence, perceived trust, effort expectancy, and personal innovativeness.Finally, in terms of barriers, perceived risk and cost are the harmful impact elements that affect behavioural intention to embrace cashless transactions.
Even though this study has produced several signi cant contributions, it has limitations.First and foremost, the model that was proposed for this research, known as CTAM, may not be appropriate for examination in other contexts.Second, the data for this investigation were collected using a non-probability, convenient sampling method that did not guarantee a su cient population representation.Third, the sample size for this study is small, and we could not physically identify the users of cashless transactions precisely due to the pandemic.

Figures
Page 20/21 The research framework of this study: UTAUT3

Table 3
Results of the measurement model Notes: "variance in ation factor"; CR, "Composite reliability"; AVE, "average variance extracted"; All factor loadings at the 0.05 level are statistically signi cant.

Table 4 Results
Note: The diagonal elements in italics correspond to the square roots of AVE.

Table 5
Notes: S, supported; NS, Not supported; *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001 factors, including PE, EE, SI, PT, PI, SE, PC, PR, and ANX, that in uence the adoption of cashless transactions from the current literature without overlap or redundancy.Second, this research has incorporated new potential constructs such as PEOR, PEB, and PES that in uence the adoption of cashless transactions.Further, this study's ndings indicate that PES (β = 0.279) was the second most in uential among these new constructs, and PEOR (β = 0.224) was the third most signi cant factor in adopting cashless transactions.
This research has successfully developed and validated Cashless Transaction Adoption Model (CTAM) within the realm of the acceptability of cashless transactions.For this purpose, rst, this research integrated appropriate elements from the most prominent theories, such as TAM, TRA, DTPB, UTAUT, and UTAUT2, to investigate adopting cashless transactions.As a result, this research identi ed nine critical