Further Insight into the Usage of Bank Cards Over Cash at the Point-of-Sale?

The several benefits of e-payment for consumers, businesses, and economies make decreasing or ideally eliminating the use of cash an important concern of governments and policymakers. In several emerging countries, there is substantial evidence that using bank cards for payment in retail Point-Of-Sale is still less popular than cash, especially for small-value purchases. Attitudinal factors are amongst the major understudied motives of bank card payment behavior. Little is known about the effects of perceived benefits of bank card use on trust and the subsequent outputs of this trust. Building on the Technology Acceptance Model and the Theory of Planned Behavior, this research proposes and empirically tests a model explaining the roles of perceived benefits and security in affecting consumer trust and the consequent effect of trust on consumers’ attitudes toward bank card payment. This attitude is supposed to build continued usage of bank cards for in-store payment. Respondents were approached in real conditions where the experience of payment in retail Point-Of-Sale occurs. A questionnaire was administered face-to-face with respondents surveyed before they left several small retail stores such as grocery stores, convenience stores, and minimarkets in Southeast Tunisia. The PLS-SEM results show that consumers have built up trust because of their perceived benefits and security of bank card payments. Trust has a positive effect on consumers’ attitudes toward bank cards. The positive attitude persuades consumers to use bank cards for payment purposes at Point-Of-Sale. The findings help inform the research community by elucidating the nature of the relationships between perceived benefits, perceived security, trust, attitude, and continued payment with bank cards in retail Point-Of-Sale. Governments, financial service providers, and businesses need to focus on developing valuable perceived benefits of using bank cards to increase trust, positive attitude, penetration, and continued customers’ usage of bank cards. This will benefit local and national economies by winning greater market share from cash. The Tunisian context is examined in this research. However, the results might be applied to many other in-developing countries.