Assessment of Digital Payment Transaction Efficiency Using the PROMETHEE II Method: A Multi-Method Comparative and Sensitivity Analysis

The proliferation of digital payment channels confronts merchants, platform operators, and regulators with a genuinely multi-criteria efficiency question: channels that settle fastest are rarely the cheapest, and the most secure are rarely the most interoperable. This study assesses the transaction efficiency of eight digital payment channels (QRIS, e-wallet, mobile banking, internet banking, virtual account, online debit card, online credit card, and chip-based e-money) against six conflicting criteria (processing time, transaction fee, success rate, security, availability, and interoperability) using PROMETHEE II with a linear (V-shape) preference function as the featured outranking method. To satisfy robustness expectations for methodological studies, the PROMETHEE II ranking is benchmarked against four compensatory and compromise methods (TOPSIS, SAW, WASPAS, and VIKOR) using Spearman rank correlation and Borda aggregation, and stressed through 24 weight-perturbation scenarios. PROMETHEE II ranks mobile banking first (net flow ? = 0.2632) narrowly ahead of QRIS (? = 0.2490), a result reproduced exactly by VIKOR (? = 0.9762), whereas the three compensatory methods rank QRIS first (? between 0.6905 and 0.7143 with PROMETHEE II). Sensitivity analysis shows high ordinal stability (? ? 0.9762 in all scenarios) but a weight-dependent leader: QRIS overtakes mobile banking in 8 of 24 scenarios, precisely when speed or interoperability weights rise or reliability-related weights fall. The paper is presented as a methodological demonstration on an illustrative dataset and discusses the managerial meaning of the compensatory–outranking divergence for payment-channel portfolio decisions.