Frictionless money, frictionless debt: E-wallets, PayLater, and the financial socialization of Indonesia’s digital generation

Olivia Putri Dahlan ()
Additional contact information
Olivia Putri Dahlan: Privietlab Research Center

Journal of Financial Literacy, 2026, vol. 1, issue 2, 25-32

Abstract: Indonesia’s payment landscape has been transformed in less than a decade. E-wallets and buy-now-pay-later (BNPL, locally “PayLater”) services now sit inside the shopping applications that young Indonesians open dozens of times a day, and their defining commercial virtue is frictionlessness: money that moves without being felt. This commentary argues that frictionlessness is not a neutral convenience but a deliberate design choice that suppresses the psychological “pain of payment,” and that its costs fall disproportionately on a digital generation whose financial literacy remains thin and whose consumption norms are formed on social media. Drawing on Indonesian and international evidence, I contend that e-wallets cultivate an illusion of liquidity that converts low self-control into excessive spending, that BNPL functions as credit that does not feel like credit and sits largely outside responsible-lending obligations, and that social media intensity both fuels impulsive adoption and erodes the protective influence of financial parenting. Protective factorsfinancial self-efficacy, parental socialization, mindfulness, and digital financial literacyare real but unevenly distributed. I conclude that financial education and regulation must engage with payment architecture itself: friction, salience, and default design should become objects of policy, not merely information provision. Otherwise, Indonesia risks socializing a generation into debt it never consciously decided to take. Keywords: buy-now-pay-later; e-wallets; pain of payment; financial literacy; Indonesia

Keywords: buy-now-pay-later; e-wallets; pain of payment; financial literacy; Indonesia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journal.privietlab.org/download.php?id=13411 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:prv:jflprv:2117

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://journal.priv ... FL/article/view/2117

DOI: 10.55942/jfl.v1i2.2117

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Financial Literacy from Privietlab Research Center
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mochammad Fahlevi ().