A Structural Analysis of Credit Card Management Challenges: An ISM–MICMAC Approach from Customer and Banker Perspectives

Abstract

Credit cards have become an essential part of today’s banking and electronic payment systems, as they provide convenience and short-term credit access. However, their management presents a number of interconnected challenges for customers and banking institutions, such as financial costs, problems of repayment, fraud and data-security problems, technical problems, customer service problems, lack of awareness and difficulty in controlling expenditure. The current study intends to find out the main challenges in credit card management and to analyse how they are interrelated from the combined perspective of customers and bankers. The main data were gathered through purposive sampling of 110 respondents, 99 customers, and 11 bankers through Zoom meetings and direct interaction. Seven critical challenges were identified and analysed through the application of Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) and MICMAC (Cross-Impact Matrix Multiplication Applied to Classification). The ISM analysis reveals a three levels hierarchical structure with high interest rates and financial costs associated with credit card (C1) and lack of awareness and understanding of credit card terms (C6) at the base level, difficulty in repayment and financial burden (C2), fraud and data security (C3), technical and transaction related difficulties (C4), and customer service and complaint resolution (C5) at the intermediate level, and difficulty in spending control and credit management (C7) as the dependent outcome. According to the results of the MICMAC analysis, C1 and C6 are independent variables, C2–C5 are linkage variables and C7 is a dependent variable. The results indicate that credit card management difficulties are linked, not separate, with financial costs and awareness factors being important driving elements in the structural system. The study offers an integrated customer-banker perspective and offers useful insights for improving credit card management, customer awareness, service delivery, transaction security and responsible credit utilisation.