Factors affecting the adoption of Internet banking in Tunisia: An integration theory of acceptance model and theory of planned behavior

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Abstract

This paper examines empirically the factors that affect the adoption of Internet banking by Tunisian bank customers. As base model, we use the technology acceptance model (TAM) and theory of planned behavior (TPB). The model employs security and privacy, self efficacy, government support, and technology support, in addition to perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, attitude, social norm, perceived behavior control and intention to use Internet banking. Structural equation modeling is employed to examine the inter-correlations among the proposed constructs. A survey involving a total of 284 respondents is conducted and confirmatory factor analysis was used to determine the measurement efficacies. Theoretically, this study confirms the applicability of the TAM model and TPB in predicting Internet banking adoption by Tunisian bank customers. The results allow banks' decision makers to develop strategies that can encourage the adoption of Internet banking. Banks should improve the security and privacy to protect consumers' personal and financial information, which will increase the trust of users. Government should also play a role to support bank industry by having a clear and solid law on this will ensure that customers are more confident for using Internet banking, ensuring a better Internet infrastructure and helps them to encourage users to use Internet banking. Lastly, Tunisian Banks should focus on those clients who already have a home PC, access Internet and more educated and younger since they are the most likely to adopt Internet banking.

Introduction

The evolution of technological innovation has had a major effect in banking industry. This evolution of banking has been driven by changes in distribution channels as evidenced by automated teller machine (ATM), Phone-banking, Telebanking, PC-banking and most recently Internet banking (Chang, 2003).

The adoption of technology has led to the following benefits: greater productivity, profitability, and efficiency; faster service and customer satisfaction; convenience and flexibility; 24 × 7 operations; and space and cost savings. Banks have recognized the importance to differentiate themselves from other financial institutions through new distribution channels. This has resulted in banks developing, and utilizing new alternative distribution channels to reach their customers (Daniel, 1999, Thornton and White, 2001).

Recently, Internet banking has been rapidly gaining popularity as a potential medium for electronic commerce (Crede, 1995, Ooi, 1999). The rapid growth of the Internet has presented a new host of opportunities as well as threats to business. With the development of new technology, Internet banking is expected to become a major banking method for customers. Internet banking should reduce costs by providing customers with another means of accessing their accounts without physically visiting a bank (Martin & Ambrosio, 2003). In addition, competition pressure from non-banks entering the financial markets by offering financial products and services have forced many banks to adopt Internet banking methods in order to stay competitive (Mols, 1998, Sathye, 1999).

In recent years, a variety of theoretical perspectives have been applied to provide an understanding of the determinants of Internet banking adoption and use, including the intention models from social psychology. From this stream of social psychology research, the technology acceptance model (TAM) (Davis, 1989), an adaptation of theory of reasoned action (TRA) (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975) and the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991) (TPB), are especially well researched intention models that have proven successful to predict technology acceptance behavior (Chau and Hu, 2001, Gefen, 2000, Gefen and Straub, 2000, Igbaria et al., 2005, Szajna, 1994).

The purposes of this study are as follows:

  • 1.

    To identify and describe the factors influencing the adoption of Internet banking in Tunisia.

  • 2.

    To clarify which factors are more influential in affecting the intention to use Internet banking in Tunisia.

  • 3.

    To evaluate whether the integration of TAM and TPB provides a solid theoretical basis for examining the adoption of Internet banking in Tunisia.

The remainder of the paper is set out in seven sections. The first section contains a literature review on online banking and information systems acceptance. The second section presents the research methodology used in this work. The third section comprises the data analysis and hypotheses testing results. In this section the data is analyzed using a structural equation modeling. The Fourth section presents results. The fifthly sections consists to discuss the main findings and draw implications for theory and practice in sixthly section. Seventhly and finally, we suggest conclusion and future research directions and offer some final remarks.

Section snippets

Internet banking in Tunisian

Internet banking is another term used for online banking. Both share the similar meaning. Internet banking or online banking is defined as the use of Internet as a remote delivery channel of banking system services via the World Wide Web. Internet banking allows customer to have direct access to their financial information and undertake financial transactions without the hassle of going to the bank (Abdul Hamid, Amin, & Lada, 2007).

This system enables customers 24 hour 7 day access to their

Research model

Based on the literature review and integrating TAM and TPB, a model indicating the adoption of online banking was developed (Fig. 1). The model consists of nine constructs that we posit to have an effect on adoption of online banking. These constructs include: perceived of use, perceived ease of use, security and privacy, self efficacy, government support, and technology support as independent variables. Attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control were used as intervening

Methodology

The constructs in the model are operationalized from existing measures developed and employed in previous research. The survey items for perceived usefulness, attitude, and intention used in this study were adapted from Cheng, Lama, and Yeung (2006), containing four items for perceived usefulness and attitude and three items for intention to use Internet banking. The constructs of security and privacy were adopted from Pikkarainen, Pikkarainen, Karjaluoto, and Pahnila (2004), and included six

Discussion

This study adopted the TAM and TPB to examine the adoption of Internet banking in Tunisia. The results of this study show that perceived usefulness is found to be a significant determinant to predict the intention to use the Internet banking. This is similar to the TAM model, which has been applied in other adoption studies. Moreover, the result was consistent with Chiu et al., 2005a, Chiu et al., 2005b and Cheong and Park (2005). Chiu et al., 2005a, Chiu et al., 2005b, Cheong and Park (2005)

Implications

The results of this study present both theoretical and practical contributions. The model developed in this study represents an important improvement for TAM and TCB by adding four constructs, security and privacy, self efficacy, government support and technology support that have not been addressed by previous studies.

The results show that intention to adopt Internet banking in Tunisia can be predicted by attitudinal factors (perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and security and

Conclusion and future study

This study aims to develop an extended TAM with a TPB model to the intention to use Internet banking in Tunisia. It gives a better understanding on the factors contributing to the Internet banking success, especially for a developing country such as Tunisia. The results show that the proposed model has a good explanatory power and confirms its robustness in predicting customers' intentions to use Internet banking. There are several limitations in this research study.

First, the factors selected

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