Business organizations today are increasingly depending on mobile information technologies to improve operating efficiency and enhance speed to respond changes in the business environment. Banks are no exception in jumping on this bandwagon. Recently ...
Business organizations today are increasingly depending on mobile information technologies to improve operating efficiency and enhance speed to respond changes in the business environment. Banks are no exception in jumping on this bandwagon. Recently banks are making moves to increase the proportion of online transactions to leverage savings in transaction costs. In particular, banks are deploying mobile strategies using such technologies as smartphones and tablet PC’s to provide mobile banking services which are believed to accelerate bank’s online strategies. Despite these strategic moves, there are still a number of customers who are reluctant to use mobile banking services due to various reasons including the lack of skills to utilize such mobile devices. And the reluctance of these customers to accept mobile banking would remain a chief barrier to bank’s online initiatives.
Given this issue faced by banks, it is imperative that studies be conducted to explore the factors influencing the customer’s intention to accept mobile banking services to offer useful implications to banks. While there are numerous studies focusing on the antecedents of intention to use mobile banking, they mostly present conceptual models based on consumer behavior theories, including theory of reasoned action(TRA), theory of planned behavior(TPB), technology acceptance model(TAM). Besides, while in collectivist-oriented cultures (e.g., Korea) where the society values collective behavior as opposed to individual behavior, social influence factors like information cascades or social norms can play a more dominant role in determining the intention to use technologies, we can hardly find studies incorporating the social factors in the research model.
The purpose of this research is to identify and integrate all relevant theories and propose an integrative research model to predict related to the intention to use a technology. In particular, we aim at drawing a set of antecedents to the intention to accept mobile banking from the related literature, developing a conceptual model, and then testing the model through an empirical analysis based on a questionnaire survey.
To accomplish the research purpose, we have conducted a survey using 751 respondents. Data collected via the survey was analyzed using statistical packages including SPSS and AMOS. The research model and hypotheses were tested using a structured equation modeling technique. The results revealed that nine of the ten hypotheses were supported, while one hypothesis was rejected. The rejected hypothesis was concerned with the positive relationship between subjective norm and the intention.
Below are summarized key findings of the present research. First, consumer’s attitude toward mobile banking is significantly affected by perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived security. Second, subjective norm denoting the extent to which an individual feels he or she should conform to a social norm was found to be significantly influenced by perceived herd behavior. Third, perceived behavioral control referring to an individual’s perceptions of his ability to use mobile banking services is significantly affected by personal innovativeness as well as self-efficacy. Fourth, the intention to accept mobile banking was found to be predicted by attitude, perceived herd behavior, and perceived behavioral control. That is, it was found that the more positive a consumer’s attitude, the stronger the consumer’s perceived herding pressures, and the higher the perceived behavioral control, the stronger a consumer’s intention to accept mobile banking.
Our research findings provide practical as well as academic implications. Academic implications are as follows. First, the present research is the first to provide an integrative conceptual model to predict the intention to accept mobile banking. Second, this study helped understand the effects of social influences on the intention to use mobile banking services. It was found that informational, not normative, social influence has a significant positive effect on the intention. We can find practical implications from the findings too. First, the findings suggest that banks should develop strategies to increase the consumers’ intention to use mobile banking by promoting a more positive attitude, publicizing the recent widespread trend of mobile banking, and increasing the customers’ perceptions of their ability to utilize mobile banking services. Second, banks’ online strategies should be geared towards enhancing the consumer attitude by strengthening usefulness, ease of use, and security of mobile banking services as perceived by the consumers. Third, banks should take steps to fortify the consumer perceptions of behavioral control by trying to produce instructional materials related to the use of mobile services to ultimately improve mobile banking self-efficacy. Finally, banks should consider exposing news concerning the widespread use of mobile banking to potential users in the related websites for the primary purpose of increasing the perceptions of herding behavior associated with mobile banking.
This study is subject to a few limitations. First, although this research is intended to present an integrative theoretical model, it has failed to incorporate certain constructs. For example, actual behavior (e.g., behavior to accept mobile banking) as included in the theory of planned behavior is excluded from the model, since our study is focused on the antecedents of the intention and the behavior was beyond the scope of this study. Second, while the acceptance of an innovation may be affected by the age of a user, the present survey did not include the youth group in the sample, thereby possibly yielding results unevenly distributed over age groups. Third, it will be worthwhile to examine potential differences in the attributes of mobile banking use between accepters and non-accepters. Such an analysis would help banks devise ways of motivating non-accepters to accept the mobile banking services.