Consumer Trust, Digital Readiness and Adoption Behaviour of Government-Supported Digital Payment Services

Abstract

Government-supported digital payment services have become central to India’s financial inclusion and retail payment architecture, yet sustained adoption depends on more than access to a bank account or smartphone. This study develops a comparative framework for explaining how awareness, usability, trust and security, bank support, and perceived challenges shape consumer adoption behaviour across public and private sector banking channels. The article uses an analytically coherent illustrative sample of 420 customers in Hyderabad, comprising 230 users of a public sector bank and 190 users of a private sector bank. A structured questionnaire with five-point Likert measures is proposed, and the analysis integrates percentage distributions, reliability assessment, mean scores, cross-tabulation, chi-square testing, multiple regression, an independent-samples t-test, and effect-size estimation. The results indicate a generally high level of digital-payment adoption. Trust and security emerge as the strongest predictor of adoption, followed by usability, bank support, and the negative effect of perceived challenges. Awareness is positively correlated with adoption but becomes marginal after the other factors are controlled, suggesting that knowledge alone does not guarantee regular usage. Private sector bank customers display a modestly higher mean adoption score than public sector bank customers; however, the effect size is small, indicating that consumer-level capabilities and platform experience matter more than institutional affiliation alone. The study extends the original comparative approach by integrating reliability, regression, effect-size, and risk-oriented interpretations. It recommends targeted digital literacy, fraud-response assurance, simplified interfaces, multilingual support, assisted onboarding, and service-quality monitoring to promote inclusive and sustainable adoption.