Contextual facilitators and barriers influencing the continued use of mobile payment services in a developing country: insights from adopters in India

ABSTRACT

Mobile payment services hold the potential for financial inclusion in developing economies. Low-income countries are characterized by distinctive conditions like price sensitivity, low digital penetration, high risk of failure, and competitive emerging markets, which further influence mobile payment usage. We develop a research model to identify the contextual facilitators (like price benefit, network externalities, trust, and habit) and barriers (like risk, lack of facilitating conditions, and operational constraints) driving mobile payment usage intention. We test the model using data from 298 survey respondents from India who had adopted and were currently using mobile payment services. The factors that facilitate or constrain users’ intention to continue using mobile payments are essential in understanding the technology’s sustenance and its future in enabling financial inclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobile payment services
• mobile wallets
• continued usage
• intention to use
• developing countries
• ICT4D

Acknowledgments

This study is a significant extension of an earlier work, which appeared at the Sig GlobDev workshop 2018 (Pal, Herath, De’, & Rao, 2018a). We would like to sincerely thank the reviewers of the proceedings and the audience at the workshop for their valuable feedback, which helped us substantially to develop the paper. We would also like to thank the associate editor and the reviewers of this paper for giving insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Abhipsa Pal is a doctoral student in Information Systems area at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, India. Prior to joining the Ph.D. program, she has worked with Infosys limited as a software engineer. Her research interests include usage of mobile payment technology, facilitators and barriers impacting continuance of mobile payments, ICT4D, and antecedents to perceived risk and security. Her work has appeared in journals like Information Technology for Development and Journal of Banking and Financial Technology.

Tejaswini Herath is an Associate Professor of Information Systems in the Goodman School of Business at Brock University, Canada. She received her Ph.D. from the State University of New York, Buffalo (UB). Dr. Herath holds a NSA certified Certificate in Information Assurance from SUNY Buffalo. She has MMIS, MSCE degrees from Auburn University, USA and a BE from Pune University, India. She also completed Certified General Accountant (CGA) certification in Canada. Her research interests are in Information Assurance and include topics such as information security and privacy, diffusion of information assurance practices, economics of information security and risk management. Her research has been funded by SSHRC Canada and other grants. Her work has appeared in leading journals such as the Journal of Management Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, European Journal of Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, Information Systems Management, and Journal of Business Ethics among others.

Rahul De’ is Professor and Chair of Information Systems at IIM Bangalore. His articles have appeared, recently, in journals such as Technological Forecasting and Social Change, IT for Development, IT & People, Information Systems Frontiers, EJISDC, and Science, Technology & Human Values. He has won two Outstanding Paper awards for his research. He serves on the editorial boards of Information & Management, Government Information Quarterly, International Journal of Information Management, IIMB Review, and Digital Government: Research and Practice. His research interests lie in ICT for Development, Electronic Government, Open Source, Internet Governance, and Digital Transformation. He has published over 70 articles in refereed journals, as book chapters, and in refereed conference proceedings. He obtained is PhD from the Univ of Pittsburgh.

H. Raghav Rao is the AT&T chair professor of ISCS at UTSA. He has a courtesy appointment in Computer Science department. He graduated from Purdue University.

Notes

1 In this paper, the terms developed country, developed economies, or low-income economies, refers to countries with less industrial development and low Human Development Index, as categorized by United Nations as ‘developing countries’ (World Economic Situation and Prospects, 2014).

2 Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is the central banking body of India.

3 The International Telecommunication Union is a specialised agency of the United Nations that is responsible for global issues related to information and communication technologies (ICT) and publishes ICT related data.