Simulation-Based Assessment of QRIS Adoption Scenarios and Transaction Efficiency among Indonesian MSMEs

QRIS stands for Quick Response Code Indonesian Standard, which is considered to be an alternative for payment digitalization of micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). The issue is that previous studies consider adoption in a dichotomous manner and focus mainly on behavioral intention rather than operations. This paper suggests a simulation-based estimation of the impact of adoption intensity defined as QRIS transactions share on transaction efficiency of MSMEs. A synthetic dataset was created by means of statistical distributions with four hundred synthetic MSMEs across five industries in Indonesia being used. In order to estimate the impact, a benchmark scenario and five adoption scenarios (from 20% up to 100%) were analyzed. In order to estimate the performance, the author used the following components: payment time, transaction cost, errors in the recording process, failures probability, reconciliation time, and processing capacity to calculate the weighted Transaction Efficiency Index (TEI). To propagate uncertainty, a Monte Carlo simulation with one thousand iterations was implemented. The results have shown that average TEI increases from 0.653 to 0.782 in case of digital dominance. Average payment time is reduced by 19.9% and the cost of monthly payments is reduced by 11.2%. It should be noted that there is a trade-off as a result of adoption – QRIS failure exposure increases from 1.8% to 6.8% of transactions. The metamodel estimated with regression shows that there is a positive influence of adoption intensity on TEI (?=0.170; p<0.001) which is significantly improved by internet reliability and digital literacy of MSMEs. The sensitivity analysis revealed that such factors as cash processing time and QRIS processing time play the key role in the model.