Socio-Economic Sustainability through Technology Application: Evaluating Trust and System Usability in Digital Banking Adoption

This study examines the socio-economic sustainability outcomes of digital banking adoption in Armenia through a two-layer conceptual model in which technology-acceptance constructs serve as antecedents and four perceived sustainability outcomes (financial inclusion, economic benefit, business enablement, and inclusive participation) serve as analytical endpoints. Drawing on survey data from 410 respondents and a supplementary sustainability-perception measurement block, the model was estimated using PLS-SEM with bootstrapping (5,000 resamples). The results identify institutional trust as the dominant predictor of digital banking adoption (= 0.36, t = 4.89, p < 0.001), while classical TAM constructs—perceived usefulness (= 0.11, p = 0.195), perceived ease of use ( = 0.07, p = 0.328), and perceived risk ( =-0.04, p = 0.448)—do not retain explanatory power once trust is included. Behavioural intention strongly predicts actual usage ( = 0.67, t = 10.32, p < 0.001), with the antecedent layer explaining 52% of the variance in intention and 61% in usage. Actual usage significantly and positively predicts all four sustainability outcomes (p < 0.001), with the strongest effect on perceived inclusive participation ( = 0.41) and financial inclusion ( = 0.34), and weaker effects on economic benefit ( = 0.25) and business enablement ( = 0.19). Bootstrapped indirect effects analysis confirms that the trust-adoption-sustainability chain is empirically coherent: trust propagates to all four sustainability outcomes through the adoption mechanism (indirect effects ranging from 0.046 to 0.099, 95% bias-corrected CIs excluding zero), with the strongest propagation to inclusion-oriented outcomes. These findings reposition technology-acceptance research within a socio-economic sustainability framework and provide empirical evidence that institutional trust, rather than usability attitudes, is the binding constraint on the inclusive and sustainable transformation of financial systems in transitional economies.

Digital banking adoption; Financial inclusion; Institutional trust; Socio-economic sustainability; Transitional economy

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