From Mobile Adoption to Payment-Rail Use

Betul Aktas1,*

1 Higher Vocational School, Cag University, Mersin, Turkey

Received: March 03, 2025 Revised: May 12, 2025 Accepted: August 11, 2025 ⋆ Corresponding author

ABSTRACT

Measures of financial-technology adoption often bundle devices, interfaces, accounts, and the payment instruments

themselves, which can end up making the transformation of payment rails look bigger than it really is. In other words,

it’s sort of easy to overstate what changed in the underlying payment rails when you mix everything together. This

study builds a friction-aware measurement framework that separates instrument adoption, recent use, payment-count

share, and the transaction context. We apply the framework to nationally representative, weighted U.S. consumerpayment

tables that were available by 31 March 2025. The analysis follows eight payment instruments from 2015

to 2023, and then links their payment-count shares to consumer rankings of acceptance setup, convenience, cost,

record keeping, and security. In 2023, credit and debit cards together made up 62.2% of payment transactions,

while stored-value mobile-payment applications were below 1%. So widespread mobile-device adoption seems to

have meant a change in the payment interface , not a direct replacement of the card and bank-account rails. Also,

credit and debit cards show the highest use-depth ratios among recent users. In a two-way fixed-effects model, a

one-standard-deviation decline in the convenience rank lines up with an 8.97-percentage-point drop in payment share

(p = 0.0047); the other rankings, well, were not independently separable from zero. An expanding-window ridge

model didn’t beat a persistence benchmark over 2021–2023, even though it did generate a lower forecast error in 2023.

Overall the evidence suggests payment-rail transformation is driven by convenience, behavioral persistence, and

transaction context rather than interface adoption only. Finally, the study offers a practical measurement architecture

that financial institutions, payment platforms, and regulators can use when they’re trying to check for genuine rail

substitution.

Keywords: Digital payments Mobile payment Payment choice FinTech adoption Payment rails Consumer

behavior Financial digital transformation

1. INTRODUCTION

Digital payments have kind of expanded through mobile wallets

, contactless interfaces , embedded checkout, and app

based financial services. But the thing is, what you actually

see on the screen is not always the underlying payment

instrument. Like, a smartphone can kick off a credit card

transaction, a debit card transaction, a bank account transfer,

or even a stored value payment. So if you treat every little

mobile interaction as if it were a brand new payment rail, it

starts to blur the customer facing access layer with the funding

and settlement machinery underneath it. This separation

is important, especially when you evaluate market disruption,

competition, operational resilience, and financial inclusion.

Research on financial technology adoption suggests that

things like convenience usefulness trust, social influence,

and perceived risk steer initial take up and ongoing usage

[1, 2, 3, 4]. The payment choice literature, on the other hand,

looks more at what people actually do, and it highlights determinants

such as transaction value merchant acceptance