Exploring the growth challenge of mobile payment platforms: A business model perspective

Abstract The power of platform business models has grown as our economies become increasingly digital, but how companies address the challenge of platform growth to achieve a critical mass of users remains unclear. In this study, we take a business model (BM) perspective to understand how mobile payment platform providers go about addressing such a challenge. We studied how mobile payment providers engaged in innovation of their business models, and thus identified three pertaining aspects: rethinking the relationship management with retailers, creating partnerships with other actors in the payment ecosystem to complement and deliver the proposed value, and integrating and using front-end mobile technology. Furthermore, our study suggests that mobile payment providers need to adapt their role within the ecosystem to scale the platform, and that it will depend on their choice of scope of geographic availability. Finally, we suggest that mutual adaptation of BMs of platform-associated actors leads to improved diffusion of the platform offer, which also hints at the need for researchers to revisit innovation diffusion and technology adoption theories by acknowledging the importance of the BM of the offer side of technology.