This paper examines the antecedents of cashless payment systems among businesses in Malaysia. The adoption of cashless payment systems by businesses has the potential to reduce the costs related to handling huge amounts of cash in the market and enhance transaction speed. Unfortunately, its current adoption in Malaysia is still small and very little is known about the factors. A seven-factor model based on the TOE framework was developed and tested. The partial least square (PLS) statistical approach was employed to analyze data collected from 200 business entities in Malaysia. The results reveal that compatibility and technology competence have higher significant relationships with the adoption of cashless payment systems. Management support, firm critical mass, competitive pressure, and information intensity are significantly related to the adoption of cashless payment systems, while firm size is not associated with it. The findings of this study provide significant practical implications for Malaysian stakeholders and technology vendors to recognize factors that affect a firm’s adoption of cashless payment systems to support business transactions. By investigating the phenomenon through the TOE framework, this study presents an integrated model of cashless payment systems by businesses. Our findings also offer guidance for future application of the PLS method in cashless payment and related research. The paper provides a more holistic understanding of the factors influencing cashless payment systems among businesses.

In recent years, uncertainty in financial markets has stimulated the need to explore alternative avenues for safeguarding wealth and managing risk. In this strand of research, gold has been particularly important due to its potential to mitigate risk and preserve wealth. This study investigates gold behaviour against equities and currencies in three regions across Asia. We follow Engle’s (2002) dynamic conditional correlation-multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (DCC-MGARCH) model to test the gold link with equity and currency markets. We use a weekly series of exchange rate (national currency/the US dollar), equity and gold prices in national currency over the weekly period, 1995–2013. The sample consists of 12 countries covering East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia. Findings suggest that gold is just a diversifier against stocks in the Asian economies except in Korea, Singapore and Thailand. However, gold acts as a hedge and safe haven against Asian currencies—except China and Hong Kong—thus still preserving its monetary role.

This study examines the relationship between energy consumption, financial development and economic growth for ASEAN-5 countries, namely Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, over the period from 1980 to 2017. Finance–growth and energy–growth relationships have been well researched; however, the energy–finance–growth nexus is an equally important but less explored area. Our Auto Regressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) bounds test for cointegration results suggests that the variables tend to move together in the long run for all countries, apart from Indonesia. Our study also considers the effect of a structural break due to financial crisis and confirms that the break does not affect the long-term relationship among the variables; in other words, the financial crisis does not affect the energy–finance–growth nexus. Hence, considering the consistency of energy consumption, the importance of the energy sector must not be undermined, and appropriate energy policies are instrumental in maintaining a well-managed financial sector for sustainable economic growth.