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As a technological tool, mobile payments hold promise for socio-economic development in many developing economies. Mobile payments service has become the leading payment platform, leveraging capabilities such as extensive distribution, broad customer reach, and trustworthy brands (Xie et al., 2018). In most developing economies, mobile payments, with the help of the service providers, are providing an enabling environment for a flourishing digital economy through the provision of application programming interface (API) and the use of plug-and-play access to a mobile payment service (Hossain et al., 2020). This phenomenon is expanding payment platform interactions and increasing the range of products and services available to both customers and businesses (Dahlberg et al., 2015). Mobile payment interaction is stimulating broader involvement in the digital economy, enabling previously excluded segments to become more active in the economic system (Yin et al., 2019). Further, mobile payment is helping to drive innovation, local entrepreneurship, employment, and economic growth (Asiedu et al., 2018). The availability of mobile payments in developing countries has been identified as a key driver of entrepreneurial activities and is gradually becoming the norm in settling e-commerce transactions, providing opportunities for innovation and end-user entrepreneurial activities (Khrais & Azizi, 2020). A study published in Harvard Business Review in 2016 has predicted that the proper positioning of mobile payments in developing countries would drive most organizational changes in the coming decade (Tapscott & Tapscott, 2016). This calls for an understanding of the factors that influence the successful implementation of mobile payment projects to ensure that mobile payments are properly deployed in developing countries to achieve optimal goals (Asiedu et al., 2018).
More so, anecdotal evidence and a brief web investigation indicate that merchant firms leverage mobile payment technologies for entrepreneurial benefit, creating an indispensable relationship between merchant adoption of mobile payments and end-user entrepreneurship (Xie & Liu, 2013). End-user entrepreneurship occurs when an individual or a group of individuals, who are users themselves, innovate products and generate service ideas for the purpose of commercializing the service or the product (Hamdi-Kidar & Vellera, 2018; Anim-Yeboah et al., 2020). The phenomenon is facilitated by the individual’s demand for better products and services from their producers. This usually puts pressure on the end-user to find an alternative way of producing or delivering a product or a service to adequately satisfy their needs (Shah & Tripsas, 2016). As the individual tries to meet these self-anticipated demands, these end-users tend to task themselves with providing better-quality products or services to match the needs they expect to be met. When they become successful, they sometimes commercialize their innovations and become entrepreneurs who are also users of the product or service (Yin et al., 2019).
Today, the phenomenon of end-user entrepreneurship is growing. However, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical explanation on the usability of technology and its outcomes to include the unintended and undiscovered use of technology, such as a merchant’s interaction with mobile payment platform affording entrepreneurial usability outcomes (Dahlberg et al., 2015; Liébana-Cabanillas et al., 2017). Existing research has used behavioral theories like the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to explain technology usability outcomes (Liébana-Cabanillas et al., 2017). Though useful, Majchrzak and Markus (2012) and Dahlberg et al. (2015) argue that behavioral theories do not take into consideration the features and functionalities of the technology but, rather, make simplistic and deterministic assumptions about the effects of IT on human behaviors and organizational outcomes. Therefore, it is imperative to bring deeper theoretical conceptualization of the topic, particularly to include unintended and undiscovered use of such technology.