Building consumer mobile money adoption and trust in conditions where infrastructures are unreliable

Abstract

Mobile money is gaining momentum in emerging markets as the solution to bank those who were previously unbanked. The number of people in Africa who have mobile phones is 644 million subscribers and has for a long time exceeded those who have bank accounts and access to formal financial services (Cobert, Helms,&Parker, 2012). About 2.5 billion adults, just over half of world’s adult population, do not use formal financial services to save or borrow, of this number 2.2 billion of these unserved adults live in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East (Chaia et al., 2009). This study sought to explore factors that will determine adoption of mobile money by adapting Venkatesh, Thong and Xu’s (2012) Unified Theory of Acceptance and Technology Use (UTAUT 2) research model to assess the drivers of behavioural intention. The model was extended by incorporating two additional constructs; trust and infrastructure reliability, which have been excluded in previous studies that have been done in developed countries. Further to this, the findings of this study will make a significant contribution to Information Systems (IS) research by identifying factors that influence technology adoption in a developing market context.This main aim of this quantitative research was to empirically discover the deeper motivations that affect the consumer behavioural intention and usage behaviour to use mobile money in Malawi. The value of this paper lies in the use of interviews to unveil new determinants of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Technology use in the adoption of mobile money in a developing market that influence behavioural intention and usage behaviour. The seven factors examined in this study are performance expectancy (PE), effort expectancy (EE), social influence (SI), facilitating conditions (FC), price value (PV), infrastructure reliability (IR), and trust (T) moderated by gender and age impact on technology adoption. The study sample consists of 508 respondents with a response rate of 84%.The findings indicate that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions, trust, and price value were positively associated with consumer behavioural intention to use mobile money in Malawi. In addition, infrastructure reliability and social influence were found to have an insignificant effect on consumer behavioural intention to use mobile money.The research adds value on existing studies on technology adoption as it contributes to understanding disruptive technology from a consumer perspective in a developing market which has been excluded in previous research papers. Another value of this paper lies in the use of UTAUT 2 to identify a new construct, trust, as a determinant of mobile money adoption in a consumer perspective which is applicable in Malawi. In addition to this it enables us to contribute to current literature on the emerging mobile money market in Malawi, which is largely under researched.