Determinants of behavioral intention to mobile banking

Abstract

With the improvement of mobile technologies and devices, banking users are able to conduct banking services at anyplace and at anytime. Recently, many banks in the world have provided mobile access to financial information. The reason to understand what factors contribute to users’ intention to use mobile banking is important issue of research. The purpose of this research is to examine and validate determinants of users’ intention to mobile banking. This research used a structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the causalities in the proposed model.

The results indicated strong support for the validity of proposed model with 72.2% of the variance in behavioral intention to mobile banking. This study found that self-efficiency was the strongest antecedent of perceived ease-of-use, which directly and indirectly affected behavioral intention through perceived usefulness in mobile banking. Structural assurances are the strongest antecedent of trust, which could increase behavioral intention of mobile banking. This research verified the effect of perceived usefulness, trust and perceived ease-of-use on behavioral intention in mobile banking. The results have several implications for mobile banking managers.

Introduction

With the improvement of mobile technologies and devices, mobile banking has been considered as a salient system because of such attributes of mobile technologies as ubiquity, convenience and interactivity (Turban, King, Viehland, & Lee, 2006). Nowadays, users are able to conduct banking services at anyplace and at anytime and to connect banking service easily and quickly with mobile devices. Banking services are provided immediately and interactively in mobile banking.

Recently, many banks have provided mobile access to financial information throughout Europe, the United States, and Asia. In Korea, the presence of mobile technologies and devices has expanded dramatically. The percentage of cell phone users is increasing to 83% of the total population. With the increasing cell phone usage, 8.5% of cell phone users have used mobile banking and the percentage of usage is increasing (http://www.mic.go.kr). In the development of mobile banking, banks enable users to access account balances, pay bills, and transfer funds through cell phone or other mobile device, instead of visiting banks and internet banking based on computer.

This trend of mobile banking indicates a remarkable potential to the banking industry. Banks can retain existing banking users in providing a new system (mobile banking) into the existing systems and have an opportunity to convert cell phone users into banking users. Nevertheless, retaining mobile banking users and attracting new ones may not be easy (Devaraj et al., 2002, Gefen et al., 2003a). Therefore, it is important to understand what factors contribute to users’ intention to use mobile banking.

During the last two decades, many researchers have used Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to explain an individual’s acceptance of new Information Technology (IT) and verified that the perceived usefulness and the perceived ease-of-use are key constructs of individual acceptance (Adams et al., 1992, Agarwal and Karahanna, 2000, Davis, 1989, Davis et al., 1989, Doll et al., 1998, Hendrickson et al., 1993, Mathieson, 1991, Segars and Grover, 1993). However, these two factors may not exactly reflect the acceptance of mobile banking users (Hsu & Lu, 2004).

Suggesting that the effect of external variables on intention is mediated by key constructs, TAM has been extended. The primary issues of previous TAM research have been twofold: determinants of the key construct (Davis et al., 1992, Straub, 1995, Venkatesh and Davis, 2000) and another key construct of behavioral intention (Gefen, 2000, Gefen, 2003, Gefen et al., 2003a, Moon and Kim, 2001, Pavlou, 2003, Suh and Han, 2002, Teo et al., 1999, Wang and Benbasat, 2005). These researches have been developed, respectively and have resulted in several theoretical models. However, the explanatory power of these models was under 40–60% of the variance in an individual’s intention to use technology (Gefen et al., 2003a, Moon and Kim, 2001, Ong et al., 2004, Pikkarainen et al., 2004, Teo et al., 1999, Venkatesh, 2000, Venkatesh and Davis, 1996). To understand behavioral intention to mobile banking and to find the drivers of mobile banking acceptance, it is necessary to integrate these models.

The purpose of this research is to examine and validate determinants of users’ intention in mobile banking, utilizing constructs from these researches in an integrated model. In particular, this research adopts trust as another key construct of behavioral intention because e-commerce transactions are just conducted without meeting face-to-face (Gefen et al., 2003a, Grazioli and Jarvenpaa, 2000, Luhmann, 1979). Specifically, this research adds self-efficacy, facilitating conditions, social influence and system quality as determinants of key constructs (perceived usefulness and perceived ease-of-use) and familiarity with bank, situational normality, structural assurances, and calculative-based trust as the determinants of trust (Gefen, 2003, Gefen and Straub, 2003, Gefen et al., 2003a, Gefen et al., 2003b, Liu et al., 2005). This research uses a structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the causalities in the proposed model.