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Indian mobile wallet use (or e-wallet or digital wallet) has become widespread in the last 15 years. The first Indian e-wallet, Wallet365.com, was a joint product of the Times Group and YES Bank in 2006. From 2006 to 2017, the number of e-wallet service providers expanded sixtyfold (Anand, 2018). Intense competition generated alliances: telecom companies joined banks to offer digital payment products, e.g., Airtel joined the Kotak Mahindra Bank to start Airtel money; Reliance Jio began a mobile wallet with the State Bank of India; Idea Cellular and Axis Bank partnered up to create Idea Money (Axis Bank, 2018). mRupee, one of the major players in the industry, was an initiative by TATA and Docomo (Handford, 2013). By 2019, India had mobile wallets such as Paytm, PhonePe, Freecharge, Mobikwik, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, and Airtel Money (Behani, 2019).
The Indian government catalyzed mobile wallet use by advocating a digital economy - the Digital India Movement - consisting of “faceless, paperless, cashless” transactions. In 2016, the Indian government demonentized its 500-rupee and 1000-rupee notes, thus increasing the need for mobile wallets. In 2017, the Indian government approved mobile wallet interoperability, further increasing competition (Research and Markets, 2019).
By 2020, India had 748 million smartphone consumers, with 149.7 million consumers being added per year (Statistica, 2021). There were 1.10 billion mobile connections in India in January 2021 and 624 million Internet users, about 79% of the total population (Kemp, 2021). In 2021 about 90% of these Indian users visited an online retail site or store, 82% searched online for products, 77% purchased a product online, and 69% used a shopping app on a mobile device. Indian consumers also increased their total time spent using mobile phones by 30% annually. While 79.9% of consumers had accounts with a financial institution, only 3.0% had credit cards, indicating that Indian consumers could bypass cards and go directly from “cash” to mobile wallet apps.
In summary, Indian mobile wallet use has grown exponentially bypassing the intermediate stages of cordless telephones and plastic money (Eappen, 2019). India’s immense market opens opportunities for more mobile financial applications. Given the expansion of Indian mobile wallets and the assortment of available telecom carriers and digital payment products, we focus on two critical factors on the consumer’s decision to continue product use: satisfaction, a dedication factor, and loyalty, a constraining factor. We ask:
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To what extent do Indian customers weigh satisfaction and loyalty as a determinant of continuance intention to use mobile wallet?
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To what extent do age, education, and income moderate the effects of satisfaction and loyalty to continuance intention?