Ranking Mobile Wallet Service Providers Using Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Approach

Introduction

In the digital era, mobile phones have become an indispensable part of our lives. Approximately, worldwide there are a greater number of mobile phone users as compared to bank account holders (Madan & Yadav, 2016). Mobile communication technology has seen an amazing growth in the last ten years. Because of inconvenience and deficiency of conventional methods, mobile-technology based business solutions opened out (Kunganathan & Wikramanayake, 2014). Mobile wallet is among one such service initiative. It is a contemporary solution that enables customers to make electronic payment using mobile devices by entering pin code and touching smartphones on the payment terminal (Tang et al., 2014). Since m-wallet put forwards many benefits to users, it has the ability to replace other payment methods (Leavitt, 2012). In 2016, m-wallet transactions were valued at INR384bn (US$5.4bn). As users are switching to electronic mode of payments, the transaction worth is anticipated to be around INR100.6 trillion in 2024 (Global Data, 2020). There are many service providers offering mobile wallet services in India like Paytm, Mobikwik, PhonePe, Freecharge, Google Pay, etc. But users usually keep on switching among different alternatives of mobile wallet. Service providers must pay attention towards enhancing their quality of services offered since m-wallet service being an electronic form of service is distinct from other conventional services. Major difference is lack of physical contact between users and service providers (Agrawal et al., 2018). Additionally, users are now conscious about services and have less patience for substandard quality of services. As a consequence, service quality of m-wallet becomes a matter of foremost concern (Agrawal et al., 2018). Users have increased the utilization of m-wallet post demonetization and during pandemic Covid-19 (Kapoor et al., 2020). Service facilitators are battling against each other for capturing market share. Thus, dimensions impacting mobile wallet service quality require sincere attention. Key m-wallet service quality dimensions will assist service providers in increasing efficiency, gaining competitive edge and withholding customers (Routray et al., 2019).

Service quality dimensions of mobile wallets can act as a solid base for comparison among various m-wallet service providers. Measuring service quality is characterised by uncertainty, subjectivity and vagueness. The views of domain experts and users are not crisp, therefore, views should be depicted through fuzzy sets that hold the power to depict unclear data (Kahraman et al., 2007). Previously researchers have used several methods to rank criteria and alternatives in different areas but they lack adaptability/stability as their results get influenced easily. Therefore, service providers need an appropriate approach to make the decision. Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) technique is amongst the widely utilized approaches in multi-criteria decision making. The key facet of this approach is that the best alternative has the shortest distance from the ideal solution and the farthest distance from the anti-idle solution. In the current framework, the environment is fuzzy and TOPSIS set up the ground for comparison of different m-wallets, Fuzzy TOPSIS technique appears to be the best choice for comparison of m-wallets. Fuzzy TOPSIS has been employed by many researchers in their studies (Awasthi et al., 2010). They have chosen to apply it in the manufacturing sector, and limited studies have applied it in the service sector. But there is hardly any study that used this approach to evaluate service providers in the area of electronic financial services like m-wallet. So, the application of Fuzzy TOPSIS fits well in the current case, aiming to contribute to mobile wallet service facilitators in enhancing their service quality and offering a base for their comparison.

This paper seeks to evaluate and prioritize mobile wallet alternatives based on dimensions of mobile wallet service quality using fuzzy TOPSIS. The objectives of this study are:

• 1.

  To review literature and propose key dimensions of mobile wallet service quality

• 2.

  To prioritize mobile wallet alternatives on the basis of proposed key mobile wallet service quality dimensions using fuzzy TOPSIS