User Trust levels and Adoption of Mobile Payment Systems in China: An Empirical Analysis

The technology acceptance model (TAM) has been regarded as a promising model for understanding technology adoption and can be extended to different situations. Currently, mobile payment services have been widely applied in people’s daily lives in China, and understanding their critical success factors is becoming important. Mobile payments are a complex system, and a large number of factors affect their success. Since mobile payments are directly related to financial issues, their wide adoption relies heavily on people’s trust. We developed a model based on the TAM to investigate the most influential factors in building trust within the mobile payment context. We conducted an empirical survey and 373 samples were collected using a valid questionnaire from the users of the popular payment platforms in China—Alipay and WeChat payment. We found that government monitoring is the most significant factor of customer trust, followed by reputation, and security. Government monitoring directly influenced behavioral intention, was negatively associated with perceived risk and positively affected behavioral intention. Moreover, mobility, subjective norms, usefulness, ease of use, and perceived enjoyment impacts customer behavioral intention.