Digital Payment and Its Growth in the Time of COVID – 19

The Indian payments landscape has undergone a makeover in the recent past with the decision to demonetise leading to a shortage of physical currency. The current COVID-19 pandemic created a contamination fear while exchanging and using currency. Hence, the customers started adopting digital payments. Research was conducted in this context to investigate the behaviour intentions of the customers regarding digital payment usage through application of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of the Technology-2 (UTAUT2) model. This paper explores the behaviour intentions of using digital payments during the pandemic. A survey questionnaire was designed to collect the required information from 271 respondents through the judgemental sampling technique. The data were analysed using SPSS and AMOS. The results revealed that, among the seven constructs examined, effort expectancy and habit had a positive effect on behaviour intentions. No association was elicited between social influence, facilitating condition and price value on behaviour intentions. The findings also uncovered a moderately significant negative relationship between performance expectancy and hedonic motivation on behaviour intentions. Compared to prior studies, the findings regarding a few constructs from our study were in line with earlier work, whilst others were found to be not so. Also, the timing of the study might have played a role in influencing the results as most of the customers felt it was convenient to use digital payments compared to physical currency during the pandemic.