Mobile Payment Adoption: An Empirical Investigation of Alipay

Abstract

The rapid growth in the adoption of mobile payments has already begun to reshape bank payment practices. Utilizing a unique data set from a leading bank in Asia that records credit card transactions of its customers before and after the launch of Alipay mobile payment, the largest mobile payment platform in the world, this study aims to understand the impact of mobile payment adoption on bank customer credit card activities and the change of this impact after the mobile payment expansion. To do so, we employ the difference-in-differences method coupled with matching to estimate the effects. We find that mobile payment adoption not only increases customer credit card activities at the focal bank through both off-line and online channels, but also enhances customer loyalty to the bank by reducing churn. Specifically, the total credit card transaction amount and frequency of our focal bank increased by 9.4% and 10.7%, respectively. Moreover, we examine the change in the treatment effect after the mobile payment expansion and find an increase in adopters’ credit card activities and a reduction in their churn after the expansion. Next, we discuss the underlying mechanisms and show that mobile payment acts as a substitute for physical card payment in the off-line channel, and this supports the key underlying mechanism of the reduced transaction cost. However, a certain complementary effect exists between personal computer and mobile payments, likely driven by the coadoption of the two. Finally, we provide empirical evidence on conditions that facilitate the use of mobile payments, following the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology. History: Yong Tan, Senior Editor; Tianshu Sun, Associate Editor. Funding: This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants U1811462, 72071102]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2021.0156 .