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Top1. Introduction
The rapid spread of Internet users and adoption of mobile technology have led to the growth of online banking services and more particularly, the growth of mobile banking in many countries. According to the International Telecommunication Union, or ITU, (2015), the number of global internet users has risen steadily from 500 million in 2001 to about 3,207 million users in 2015. Similarly, the number of global mobile subscriptions rose from 962 million in 2001 to over 7,216 million subscriptions in 2015 (ITU, 2015).
It is widely accepted that the development and growth of mobile banking is affected by many factors (i.e. culture, education, average income levels, traditions) which differ greatly between developed and developing counties. For example, the people in Saudi Arabia are strongly attached among each other through family bonds and women represent a much smaller percentage of the workforce (Alhirz and Sajeev, 2015). Previous studies found that the social and cultural differences between Saudi Arabia and other developed countries, like the United Kingdom, for example had significant impact on adoption and satisfaction of using technology such as mobile banking (Eid & El-Gohary, 2015; Baker et al., 2011; Al-Gahtani et al., 2007). Consequently, a huge gap exists between developed nations and developing nations in terms of the development of mobile banking (Agwu and Carter, 2014; Yang et al., 2009). Therefore, a comparative study about mobile banking between a developed (UK) and developing country (Saudi Arabia) will provide some useful insights into mobile banking differences and user acceptance between these types of countries.
On the other hand, although internet usage and mobile technology were traditionally well-established in the developed countries, most developing countries are rapidly closing the technology gap between the developed and developing countries. Consequently, mobile banking (m-banking) has started to take off at steady rates in most developing countries and rapidly in some developing countries like Korea and China (Baptista and Oliveira, 2015). This led to the rapid building-up of a large body of literature on mobile banking. However, most of these are covering mobile banking in developed countries and only a fraction of research has been carried out in developing countries.
The use of mobile banking has been widely investigated in developed countries like the USA, the UK and Europe (Shanmugam et al., 2015; Martins et al., 2014; Kundu and Datta, 2012; Yiua et al., 2007; Scornavacca and Hoehle, 2006; Pikkarainen et al., 2004; Karjaluoto et al., 2002; Jayawardhena and Foley, 2000). However, little research investigated mobile banking in Saudi Arabia. Those studies which researched mobile banking and ICT infrastructure of Bank in Saudi Arabia (Al-Jabri, 2015; Khan et al., 2011; Al-Gahtani et al., 2007) did not focus much on user acceptance. Moreover, those studies did not compare user acceptance of mobile banking in developing country such as Saudi Arabia, with a developed country, like the UK. Therefore, this study aims to contribute to the growing literature on mobile banking in a developing country – Saudi Arabia. In general, the aims and objectives of this research are to explore user satisfaction of mobile banking in the UK and Saudi Arabia. More specifically, this research aims to establish whether or not Saudi customers evaluate mobile banking in the UK and Saudi Arabia differently in terms of system quality, information and interface design.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section two reviews the essential body of literature related to this research. Section three presents the theoretical framework. The next section outlines the research methodology used in conducting the research. Section five presents the data analysis, while section six discusses the research findings. Section seven concludes the study, highlights some of the research limitations and offers some recommendations for further studies.