Examining mobile based payment services adoption issues : A new approach using hierarchical clustering and self-organizing maps

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to make a unified approach in identifying the issues affecting usage intention of mobile-based payment services. The work aims to analyze the reduced factors from data obtained from a survey to highlight the influencers of usage intention mobile-based payment in an integrated manner by incorporating the technical characteristics, technology-specific characteristics, user-specific characteristics and task-specific characteristics. Design/methodology/approach – A nationwide primary survey was conducted using validated questionnaire requesting response for 11 factors obtained from published literature. In all, 196 respondents participated in the survey in India. Valid responses were analyzed using Growing Hierarchical Self-Organizing Map (GHSOM) model. The interactive GHSOM application was applied to automatically determine the filtering rules for clustering. Findings – The hierarchical structure of clusters as obtained by applying GHSOM is mainly influenced by factors like innovativeness, discomfort, system quality, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, task-fit, connectivity, absorptive capacity and structural assurance. Research limitations/implications – Increasing trend of online and mobile-based payment has been observed and reported by several studies in India. The frequency of online transactions by women have shown a steady increase over a short period of time. But the survey obtained higher percentage of data from males. Thus future researchers could focus on this aspect to study the influence of this rising trend on adoption of services like mobile-based payment. Trust and existence of physical institutions seem to affect the perception and usage intention. Future researchers may explore the influence of these two issues in situations where there has been some reported cases of breach of trust. Originality/value – There has been very few studies conducted which reported mobile-based transfer payment adoption issues where-in the transfer mechanism is independent of formal banking. Also no other study adopted the GHSOM approach to analyze the data. The findings would be beneficial for service providers of mobile-based payment services to understand their subscribers and roll out value-added services.