The Adoption of Public E-Payment Services

Abstract

Electronic government initiatives in the majority of cases pass a number of different stages, starting with a static Web site and ending with fully interactive sites that are capable of handling a multitude of transactions. The possibility of transferring money online plays an important role for those e-government initiatives that include financial transactions, such as paying taxes, fees, or fines. This paper combines the issues of e-payment and e-government, and proposes a model that depicts important factors influencing users' online payment behavior. A structural equation modeling (SEM) approach has been used to assess the strength of the relationships among different constructs, including users' previous experience, their trust in e-payment security, and the perceived convenience of the payment process. Our results indicate that trust (both in a frictionless use of the system and in e-payment security) can be seen as an important antecedent for the adoption of online payments on the part of the users. From the government's point of view, the potentials of exerting influence seem to be somewhat limited: while national institutions in developed countries are usually perceived as trustworthy, users' attitudes toward the Internet may be more skeptical, depending on their previous experiences.