This study explores the factors that contribute to the continual use of mobile banking apps by integrating design aesthetics, information quality, and perceived privacy with the expectation-confirmation information systems continuance model. A convenience sample of 300 respondents from two state-owned universities in Ghana provided survey data that was analyzed using the partial least squares-structural equation modeling technique. The results indicate that perceived usefulness is a significant factor in user satisfaction, while confirmation impacts both satisfaction and perceived usefulness. Additionally, design aesthetics and information quality have a significant influence on continual use. However, perceived security/privacy, satisfaction, and perceived usefulness have insignificant effects on continual use. By combining theoretical perspectives, this study offers a conceptual model for examining the factors that impact the use of mobile banking apps. These findings can be used by mobile app developers and marketers to develop effective marketing strategies.
TopIntroduction
Among the current trends in the financial sector is the development and adoption of mobile banking applications (apps). The uptake in the use of mobile banking apps can be associated with the increasing use of smartphones. However, despite the benefits of mobile banking apps, only a few people use this innovation in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In Ghana, for instance, there are 41.69 million mobile connections, representing 132.8% of the total population (Datareportal, 2021; Statista, 2021). Given this significant increase in mobile connectivity, statistics however show that only 7 percent of this mobile population performs some form of banking activity on their mobile devices (Statista, 2020). Promoting the use of mobile banking apps is therefore of particular importance to the banks as it reduces operational expenses and enhances customers’ banking experience (Thusi & Maduku, 2020). One way to promote the acceptance of mobile banking apps is to increase their adoption among customers who can adapt quickly to innovation (Purani, Kumar, & Sahadev, 2019). Bajwa et al. (2022) predicted that financial technologies will likely be characterized by innovation and collaboration between traditional financial institutions and mobile banking platform developers.
Banks use various technologies to deliver mobile banking services, such as short messaging services (SMS banking) and unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) (Perlman, 2017). Mobile banking services cover a wide range of financial needs such as payments, savings, borrowing, risk management, and advisory (Wojcik, 2021). Mobile banking apps are a recent development in delivering mobile banking services. Users may have different perceptions of these technologies and so their acceptance of mobile banking services may differ according to which technology the bank uses. Despite these different approaches to mobile banking, research has largely focused on overall mobile banking technology rather than examining specific approaches (Thusi & Maduku, 2020). As a result, the user’s perceptions of a particular delivery approach may be overlooked (Chen, Huang, & Davison, 2017). Given that banking apps are a recent phenomenon, particularly in developing countries, research on this delivery method is limited (Thusi & Maduku, 2020). A review of the literature identifies only a handful of studies on this subject most of which were conducted in developed nations. For example, Khurana (2023) indicates that the United States has made the most noteworthy contribution to the field of FinTech, producing the highest number of publications and citations in this area.
Recent studies investigate factors that determine the continual use of mobile banking applications in various contexts, including mobile wallets (Garrouch, 2021) and mobile payments (Pal et al., 2021). Specifically, Pan and Gao (2021) assess the perceived risks and the behavioral intention to use a mobile application. Pal et al. (2021) discuss the security risk and digital literacy issues of mobile payment systems. Solecki et al. (2020) explain the importance of usability and aesthetic features of mobile applications. Srivastava and Vishnani (2021) determine the effect of service quality on the continuance intention to use mobile banking. In general, these studies derived their constructs from a particular adoption model, without integrating factors from different theoretical perspectives. This current study proposes a conceptual model by integrating constructs from various theoretical perspectives to determine the factors that influence the continual use of mobile banking applications in a developing country. To achieve this objective, the study seeks to (a) determine the factors for the continual use of mobile banking applications, and (b) assess the factors that moderate the relationship between the determinants and the continual use of mobile banking applications.