The Institutionalisation of Mobile Payment Technologies in Kenya: Retailers' Pespective

This paper explores the mobile payment phenomenon from SME perspectives in the Kenyan retail sector. Following a qualitative approach, and in-depth interviews, the study concludes that the contextual challenges of Kenya have rendered other forms of mobile payment such as making contactless payments, unknown. However, when other mobile payment options were made known, there was strong support for proximity mobile payments. The findings show that the introduction of any alternative mobile payment option in the Kenyan context would be a challenge against the stable trusted way of conducting mobile payments. It is recommended that strategies for building trust and customer awareness and adoption of alternative payment methods; be prerequisite towards new and alternative mobile payment options by retailers. The findings show how mobile payments, such as Lipa na MPesa have become institutionalised in the Kenyan SME structures; and how SMES themselves mobilize to legitimize mobile payments. Additional results show that Kenyan retailers are strongly driven by customer’s attitude, perception and willingness to adopt new payment methods. They identify mobile network reliability as a challenge and indicated that degradation in service levels resulted in a bad customer experience as it led to confusion of a transactions success.