A Cross-Country Evaluation of Sentiment Toward Digital Payment Systems in Africa
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses a critical gap in understanding the motivations driving African users’ choices among diverse digital payment systems and how they navigate trade-offs between utility, privacy, and security. Through in-depth qualitative interviews with users in Nigeria, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, combined with a cross-national comparative analytical framework, the research uncovers the widespread practice of multi-platform usage and the nuanced decision-making processes underlying it. A key finding is users’ ambivalent trust in government institutions—relying on them for fraud prevention yet doubting their capacity to ensure product reliability. The study identifies core determinants influencing payment system adoption, offering regulators and designers evidence-based insights for crafting policies and systems that balance functional efficacy with robust trust-building mechanisms.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Digital payment systems have become a cornerstone of consumer finance in Africa. Prominent payment categories include money transfer applications, mobile money, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). While there are studies exploring how and why people use individual digital payment systems (both in Africa and beyond), we lack a good understanding of why people choose between different categories of payment systems, and how they view the tradeoffs between different categories. We conducted qualitative interviews in three African countries -- Nigeria, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe -- to understand how and why people use various payment systems, and what influenced them to start using these systems. Our study highlights several notable findings regarding tradeoffs between perceived utility, privacy, and security. For example, many users trust government issuers to protect them from scams, but they do not trust those same institutions to build reliable systems and products or prioritize customer satisfaction. We also find that most users have accounts on multiple payment systems, and conduct a complex selection process using different platforms for different types of payments. This selection process is driven in part by financial considerations, but also by security, privacy, and trust preferences. Our findings suggest compelling directions for regulators and the research community to design systems that balance users' trust and utility needs.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
digital payment systems
user choice
trust
privacy
security
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
digital payment systems
user tradeoffs
trust and utility
cross-country qualitative study
payment system selection
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