Why Palestinian E-Wallet Users Plan to Stay Despite Banking and Cash Disruptions

The researchers extended the Expectation–Confirmation Model, which examines whether a service meets users’ expectations and how that experience relates to usefulness, satisfaction and continued-use plans.

Paying a bill or sending money to family becomes more complicated when banks are difficult to reach, and physical cash is scarce. An e-wallet can make those transactions possible through a phone, but keeping people interested in the service depends on the value it delivers, their experience with it and their confidence in the provider.

Those questions sit at the heart of "E-Wallet Continuance in a Conflict-Affected Economy: New Evidence Using an Extended Expectation–Confirmation Model," published in FinTech. Researchers Alaa Mayaleh, Islam Abdeljawad and Rani Shahwan surveyed 328 active users in Palestine and found that practical usefulness had the strongest direct relationship with plans to continue using an e-wallet, supported by satisfaction and trust. The research examines what shapes those plans, giving providers a clearer picture of the experience users value.

Digital payments grow as access to cash becomes harder

Palestine's move towards digital payments is taking place in an economy that remains heavily dependent on cash, with the paper reporting that about 34% of Palestinians held a bank account in 2021. E-wallets offer an accessible route into electronic payments because people can register using a smartphone and valid identification without needing a bank account.

Unpublished Palestine Monetary Authority figures cited by the researchers show registered wallets increasing from 546,969 before 7 October 2023 to 1,088,072 by 31 May 2025, nearly doubling over that period. These totals count wallets, so they do not represent the same number of individual users. The government's adoption of the E-SADAD electronic payment system in May 2025 formed part of the wider digital payment expansion.

The pressure on conventional banking was especially severe in Gaza, where the paper cites just eight to 11 operating bank branches in January 2025, compared with 56 before the crisis. Cash shortages and damaged banknotes created further difficulties, with reports of broker commissions reaching 40% to obtain physical cash from transferred funds. These conditions provide the background to the research; the survey did not measure each participant's exposure to them.

A closer look at the people behind the payments

Five licensed providers- Jawwal Pay, PalPay Mahfazati, Maalchat, Madfoatcom and NeoCash- helped distribute an Arabic questionnaire through channels including email and WhatsApp during May and June 2025. Of 400 responses, the researchers removed 40 incomplete questionnaires and 32 from people who reported never using an e-wallet, leaving 328 active users for analysis.

Men accounted for 60.1% of the sample, 61.3% were aged 20–35, and 20.4% were Gaza residents, including displaced residents or those temporarily elsewhere. Most participants had university qualifications. Wallets served several everyday purposes, including purchases, bill payments, mobile or electricity top-ups, business transactions and transfers to relatives or friends; 45.7% selected all the listed purposes.

The researchers extended the Expectation–Confirmation Model, which examines whether a service meets users' expectations and how that experience relates to usefulness, satisfaction and continued-use plans. Their version added provider trust and perceived risk. Using PLS-SEM in SmartPLS 4, with 10,000 resampling runs, they examined both direct relationships and connections passing through other factors. This broadened earlier Palestinian evidence focused on an academic population.

Everyday usefulness carries the greatest weight

Users who considered their wallets useful for faster, easier and more efficient transactions expressed stronger intentions to continue using them. Usefulness had the largest direct relationship with those intentions, followed by satisfaction and provider trust, and it was connected to continued-use plans indirectly through greater satisfaction. The results suggest that the practical experience of moving money deserves close attention in efforts to retain users.

Having expectations met was strongly associated with greater usefulness and satisfaction, and with lower perceived security and privacy risk. Its connection with continued-use plans ran through several routes: usefulness, satisfaction, a combination of the two, and lower perceived risk followed by greater trust. Eight of the model's 10 proposed direct relationships were supported.

Higher perceived risk was associated with lower trust, and lower trust carried an indirect negative relationship with continued-use intentions. Neither risk nor trust showed a supported direct relationship with satisfaction once the other factors were considered. A user's satisfaction with a wallet and confidence in its provider therefore represented distinct parts of the decision to keep using it.

Two questions covering transaction errors and fraud or financial loss, plus one trust question, were removed because they did not work consistently with their respective measures. The remaining risk questions focused on information leaks, unauthorised data access and payment security, so the findings cannot be applied equally to every financial concern.

Better service matters, but future use remains uncertain

The model accounted for 63.8% of the variation in continued-use intentions and 64.4% in satisfaction. Its performance on held-out survey responses was more modest: a simpler linear benchmark produced slightly lower prediction errors on three of four intention measures. The authors classified the extended model's predictive power as low, despite its ability to explain relationships within the sample.

Providers can use these findings to prioritise convenient transfers, reliable transactions, realistic service promises and consistent delivery. Clear privacy policies, understandable security information and accessible complaint handling could help support confidence in the service. The absence of a direct risk–satisfaction relationship offers no reason to weaken safeguards, since security concerns were connected to trust and trust was linked to intentions. The authors suggest stronger consumer protection and digital financial literacy, with their effectiveness requiring separate evaluation.

The survey captured users' views at one point in time, so it cannot establish cause and effect or show whether stated intentions became later transactions. Convenience sampling, recruitment through providers and self-reported answers limit how widely the results can be applied; the number of people receiving the questionnaire was unknown, preventing calculation of an exact response rate. The highly educated sample also leaves questions about less represented users.

Conflict exposure, limited alternatives and individual cash-out costs were not measured, and the research did not test improvements in financial inclusion or economic resilience. Future work could follow users over time, examine actual transaction records, recruit more representative samples and compare Gaza with the West Bank. Broader risk measures, fees, merchant acceptance, service reliability and regulatory trust could help explain the remaining gaps, giving providers firmer evidence about what sustains use beyond a stated plan.