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India has come forth as one of the most thrilling markets for digital payments throughout the globe (Mandal, 2018). As per Statista, an online statistics, market research and business intelligence portal, the number of smartphone users in India was around 330 million in 2019 and was expected to rise as per the trend. The present statistics go in line with the prediction and India has 760 million smartphone users as of 2020. It implies that the number of smartphone users in India is not less and hence applications of usage of smartphones are to be taken care of. In this era of digitization, people bring their own devices to the workplace to accomplish tasks faster. Researchers emphasized that bringing your own device brings efficiency at work (Zhang et al., 2019). Similarly, smartphones can make our life easy and bring efficiency. When we possess smartphones, which can be utilized for making payments, why not use it? With the growth of the internet and enhanced smartphone penetration, the banking sector equally prioritizes transforming banking into mobile phones. Thus, a rapid development in the payment infrastructure was observed in the banking sector. In the 21st century, mobile phone payment has influenced many people's lives and is trending. However, mobile payment is far away from the mainstream and has not met the expectation in terms of adoption (Patil et al., 2020; Zhou, 2014). Thus mobile payment adoption is still in the nascent stage. The banking sector is encouraging e-payments and mobile payments to make India cashless. Almost every bank has an application that enables all sorts of mobile payments. UPI (Unified Payment Interface) is an infrastructure that these applications have integrated to facilitate easy fund transfer and faster payments. With the onset of this pandemic situation due to the novel coronavirus, the frequency of UPI payment has gone exponentially high as UPI facilitates contactless payment. Furthermore, Arjun (2021) recommended focusing on seamless payment services in the post COVID world. Hence, research on UPI usage is crucial and is attempted in the study.
When it comes to financial transactions, trust is a factor that happens to be crucial. As users are more concerned about the security of financial transactions, trust is a driver whose impact on behavioral intention (BI) should be investigated. The literature depicts a fertile opportunity to study trust in the field of e-payment (Bhuasiri et al., 2016). Manrai & Gupta (2020) and Akhlaq & Ahmed (2013) found trust to influence BI in diverse contexts like adoption of mobile banking, internet banking and e-government services respectively. However, the impact of trust has not been studied yet in the context of UPI adoption. Is it trustworthy to make a payment or transfer money from one account to another only with a few clicks? Hence it is believed that trust will play a significant role in affecting BI to use UPI. In an article about a review of technology adoption studies, Chhonker et al. (2017) noted that the frequency of studies exploring the impact of trust is not much but is growing popularity amongst researchers. The key research gap addressed in this study is to analyze the role of trust in technology adoption (Baptista & Oliveira, 2015; Shaw, 2014) in the context of UPI usage. Moreover, researchers have primarily focused on countries like the USA and China for mobile adoption studies (Wu et al., 2017; Zhou 2014). The results depicted cannot be generalized in the Indian context (Patil et al., 2020). This is because India is a land of multiple languages and cultures, and there is a difference in individuals' thought processes and behavior. Though Moghavvemi et al. (2021) stated that the results obtained in Malaysian context could be generalized in other countries to other m-payment systems, it is believed that the results might vary in Indian context. Hence the present study explores drivers of BI of Indians to use UPI, a current digital innovation that happened in India.