“Confirmatory Factor Analysis Of Key Drivers Enhancing The Utility Of Unified Payment Interface (Upi)"

Abstract

Introduction and Background: - Unified Payments Interface (UPI), one of the remarkable moves of National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) significantly gaining higher importance in the payment and transfer facilities. The UPI facility allows user to transfer money from one user to another user in the fraction of second. It also allows all time payment and transfer facilities. This study aims to identify the structural relationship between the key determinants (drivers) dominating the UPI and its impact on the Utility (Use) of the UPI.Past few studies revealed that UPI becomes the commonly used platform among the young adults, Dinesh M. Kolte and Dr. Veena R. Humbe (2020).

Research Methodology: - This study based on the Primary data of 249 users of UPI as a payment and transfer mode. The dominating UPI applications were Phone Pe, Google Pay and Paytm, which found in this study and also supporting to the output of the research conducted by Gupta et.al. (2020). Further demographic analysis points out that UPI usage tends to be more prevalent among people with higher levels of education UPI has managed to appeal to a wide audience, irrespective of their gender preferences, also observed in the research of Devid & Lucia (2022). The Cronbach alpha measure of internal consistency among the scale variables stand to 0.955, which indicates remarkable result.

Analysis and Discussion: - Demographic analysis indicates that, UPI Utility is Higher in Male than female. Further it shows high Utility of UPI services in the Age group of 21-30 Year. Further it also suggests people who completed at least their college education they tend to use more UPI services for the payments and transfers. Finally salaried people and Businessman utility is high in UPI services. High income group indicates High Utility of UPI. Majority of the People using UPI facility for the payment transfers and Routing grocery bill payments. Google pay and Phone Pe are the popular application amongst the UPI user to use UPI services. Further to assess impact of key drivers of Utility of UPI on usage of the UPI, Structural Equitation Modelling (SEM) was performed based on the factors extracted from the previous literatures. The model output shows the output like CMIN/DF stands to 1.432, NFI, RFI, IFI, TLI, and CFI are greater than 0.9 level, which indicates the good fit of model.

Empirical Evidence: - The Structural Equitation Modelling (SEM) output shows that, the construct covariances for Key drivers are Ease of Use (0.64), Security (0.87), Rewards and Cashbacks (0.21), Convenience (0.90) and Utility of the UPI (0.57), indicates thatHighest variation in the UPI utility caused by the Convenience, Security and Ease of Use. All factors collectively influencing UPI utility (0.57) which further indicates 57% collective variation observed in the UPI Utility due to theses all variables.This output is in line with the previous research to identify the factors driving UPI utility conducted by Gayathri & Shanmugam (2023).