Understanding Changes in Consumer Payment Habits - Do Mobile Payments Attract Consumers?

Mobile payment services have, thus far, failed to entice consumers. An apparent conclusion is that these services have failed to meet consumers’ payment needs. Deeper understanding of consumer adoption motivations is thus needed to be able to develop and launch mobile payment services successfully. For more than a decade researchers have tried to uncover the generic determinants of technology adoption common to most if not all technologies. Even when armed with this knowledge mobile payment services have fallen short of gaining customer bases large enough to sustain them. This suggests that the current academic knowledge is either ignored by practitioners or that the knowledge of consumer adoption is far from clear. Our paper seeks to find out if the generic technology adoption models are sufficient to explain factors consumers consider when they decide whether or not to adopt mobile payment services. In particular, we develop two models in the payment context. One of them models the determinants of the mobile payments services adoption while the other models the determinants of electronic invoicing adoption. The comparison of the model structures suggests that perceived ease of use seems to be the least common denominator for consumer adoption of these information technology based services while the context of technology adoption determines both the non-differentiating and the differentiating determinants of technology adoption.