Go Digital! Determinants of Continuance Usage of Mobile Payment Apps: Focusing on the Mediating Role of Gamification

Background: COVID-19 spread over the last two years has been instrumental in shifting physical banking transactions to mobile-based banking transactions. Recently, M-payments have dominated online and point-of-sale (POS) transactions in the Asia-pacific region. Therefore, there was a need to study the factors influencing M-payments. This research has been conducted to determine the significant factors influencing the usage and continuance usage of M-payment apps in an emerging country and particularly how gamified features enhance the usage of M-payments apps.is study is based on the perspectives of the Unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) and information system success (ISS) theory, and it adds three new determinants—trust, gamified features, and continued use of mobile payments to better explain and forecast users' behavioral intentions and continued use of mobile payment applications (M-payments apps). Method: The research has employed two studies on sample data from young users of M-payment apps (n=898), the dataset was analyzed through structural equation modelling for mediation and moderation analysis in study one. The second study was grounded through Vignette experiments to analyze the effects of the degree of gamified features on the continued usage of M-payments. Results: The results reported that behavioral intention to adopt, and usage of mobile payments are significantly mediated by gamified features and gamified features are partially mediating continuance usage of M-payments. Trust is the key to enabling continuance usage amongst the users of M-payments. These findings extend the understanding of users’ continuance intention in the context of payments apps. Conclusion: This study would be helpful in presenting insights for the M-payments service providers and the associated banks to develop strategy for the continuance usage of mobile payment apps.