The effect of trust on mobile payment adoption: A comprehensive review of literature

Trust is at the core of any payment method and it plays a crucial role in the adoption of new payment systems. Individuals need to trust in one another in order to validate any monetary system developed. With the evolution of the payment methods, shifting from paper-based to electronic-based, build consumers’ trust has become a vital element for the success of businesses in the payment systems. In this sense, the aim of this paper is to provide a scoping review of the relevant literature conducted between 2013 and 2017 on mobile payment systems (MPS) sector and point out which factors affect trust and, in turn, have influence on MPS adoption by users. In order to organise the recent studies for further discussion, this paper proposes to divide the studies into five distinct categories: country (where the study took place), method employed (surveys, interviews etc), number of respondents, focus of the research (consumers, merchants or users in general) and model (framework) used. The findings of 76 studies (2013-2017) pointed out that there are 111 different factors that have impact on mobile payment systems, according to the authors. In addition, the findings have indicated that China is the country with more studies conducted on the adoption of MPS, followed by Spain. It is worth mentioning that, in many countries the number of studies seems under-represented and in others, there are no data published yet.