Swipe or Tap? How Age Shapes the Adoption of New Technologies
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Swipe or Tap? How Age Shapes the Adoption of New Technologies
Finance & Accounting May 1, 2026<br>Swipe or Tap? How Age Shapes the Adoption of New Technologies<br>Younger people are more likely to use mobile pay when they shop. That matters in an aging society.
Based on the research of<br>Nicolas Crouzet<br>Pulak Ghosh<br>Apoorv Gupta<br>Filippo Mezzanotti
Jesús Escudero
Based on the research of<br>Nicolas Crouzet<br>Pulak Ghosh<br>Apoorv Gupta<br>Filippo Mezzanotti
Summary As older people take up a greater share of society, the likelihood that society as a whole will adopt new technologies more slowly may increase, according to research from the Kellogg School. A team of economists compared the uptake of mobile-payment technology, like Venmo and Apple Pay, with the use of credit cards in India and found that younger people were much more likely than older people to use this new technology and that businesses adopted it more rapidly in areas with a higher density of young people.
In Europe, over a fifth of the population is at least 65 years old. In Japan, the figure is nearly 30 percent. And the World Health Organization projects the percentage of people across the globe who are over 60 years old will reach 22 percent by 2050, just about double what it was in 2015.
Economists wring their hands over numbers like these, expressing concern about labor shortages, pressure on pensions, and a general deceleration in growth. But research by Kellogg’s Filippo Mezzanotti and Nicolas Crouzet, both associate professors of finance, captures another consequence of this trend: older societies are slower to adopt new technologies.<br>By comparing the uptake of mobile-payment technology—similar to Venmo and Apple Pay—against the use of credit cards in India, the researchers found that younger people were much more likely than older people to use this new technology and that businesses adopted it more rapidly in areas with a higher density of young people.<br>Ultimately, age was associated with how often people used the mobile-payment technology, and this effect appeared to shape business decisions around its adoption.<br>“These findings underscore the possibility that population aging leads to slower rates of technology diffusion, which has potential implications for how policy can, or cannot, spur the adoption of new technologies,” Mezzanotti says.<br>A preference among the young<br>Together with Pulak Ghosh from the Indian Institute of Management and Apoorv Gupta from Dartmouth, Mezzanotti and Crouzet initially set out to analyze various demographic factors that might drive people to adopt mobile-payment systems.<br>The researchers looked to India, where mobile-payment technologies supplanted credit cards as the main form of electronic payment, with its share of total e-payments surging from less than 10 percent to approximately 80 percent between 2016 and 2020.<br>The team reviewed a dataset of 200,000 customers at one of India’s largest banks. The data includes comprehensive bank-account activity and demographic information. Using a statistical tool to determine the likelihood that demographic factors affect mobile-payment adoption, they found that age was responsible for nearly 40 percent of the variation in uptake—a far larger fraction than for factors like wealth (7 percent) or occupation (5 percent).
“The choice by older consumers to not adopt something may have a cost for younger consumers, who ultimately don’t get access to the technology because it doesn’t reach a critical scale.”<br>—Filippo Mezzanotti
Further, they found that people 30 years old and younger used mobile payment for more than half of their transactions, while those 60 and older used it for roughly a fourth of their transactions.<br>“Interestingly, this relationship is what we in economics would call very monotonic, meaning the pattern shows up at every step of the distribution,” Mezzanotti says. “It’s not just that 20-year-olds are using this more than 70-year-olds, but those in their forties use it less than those in their thirties; those in their thirties use it less than those in their twenties; and so on.”<br>Age driving demand<br>But how do businesses interpret and respond to these preferences?<br>To answer that question, the researchers worked with a fintech company that, in May of 2019, expanded its point-of-sale terminals to allow mobile payment, unlike older terminals that only accepted credit cards. This created a natural test to compare how different merchants responded to the new technology. As might be predicted, stores in areas with a higher density of young people were more likely to adopt the product of the fintech company when the mobile-payment option was available, suggesting that the demand for mobile payment was at least partially driven by...