Consumer adoption and use of mobile banking: A cross-national, multigroup empirical analysis

Abstract

Ubiquitous technology usage and an increasing reliance on digital services is a hallmark of the modern world. Mobile banking provides users with a seamless, simple platform to complete routine financial activities securely at their convenience. Despite this, unsatisfactory adoption rates have been frequently observed, with distinct variations in mobile banking acceptance noted across different regional contexts. The determinants of mobile banking adoption and actual usage have been described in Information Systems (IS) literature to be noteworthy in their influence, with distinct variations in different contexts. That being said, the role and interplay between different adoption and the IS success constructs remains poorly understood in developing countries such as Lebanon, particularly when considering mobile banking. The present study thus undertook the cross-national examination of mobile banking customers’ adoption intentions and usage behaviour and their variation across two contexts. This provided insights into their predictors in a developed (UK) and developing (Lebanon) country. The proposed conceptual framework, which extends the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) model with trust, security and privacy, while also integrating IS success constructs (information quality, service quality and system quality) served for the explanation of user intentions. The research model was additionally employed to reflect the moderating influence of several factors relevant in mobile banking adoption such as age, gender, education, experience and income. A survey was distributed and a total of 478 and 419 completed questionnaires were collected from Lebanon and UK, respectively and were analysed by partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). Findings revealed that habit, perceived security and performance expectancy consistently predicted behavioural intention to adopt mobile banking across both examined contexts. Lebanese respondents were additionally concerned about the availability of facilitating conditions as well as trust when formulating their intentions to adopt this channel. Conversely, perceived privacy, price value and service quality concerns were more evident in the UK sample. However, contrary to the proposed hypothesis, social influences, hedonic motivations, effort expectancy, system quality and information quality failed to significantly explain adoption behaviour in both Lebanon and UK. Notable differences were observed on the level of the moderating influence of age, gender, experience and income between Lebanon and the UK, as opposed to education, which remained insignificant in both. The findings suggest the importance of establishing secure and useful mobile banking applications and the implementations of habit-forming elements regardless of the examined context. That being said, banks should still account for country-specific variations in users’ mobile banking adoption intentions when designing their platforms and campaigns. Careful consideration and specific targeting of potential mobile banking users according to age groups and income range could favour its adoption in the UK, while a gender- and experience-oriented approach could be more appropriate in Lebanon.