The banking landscape in India has been changing rapidly due to advent of emerging technologies. Consumers have adopted technology in their everyday banking transactions. These changes have been evident because of the advent of electronic channels like mobile banking (MB), internet banking, payments banking, fintech applications, and such others. Given the burgeoning Indian population, the brick and mortar model of banking hasn't been able to keep up with the increased and enhanced customer needs. This has led to bankers harping on adoption of mobile banking. The authors in this study applied a sequential mixed method quant-qual to better comprehend customer perceptions towards adoption of mobile banking services. The research was carried out in two phases: quantitative survey followed by qualitative interviews. The findings from the study helped gauge the user perception towards MB. These were concerns regarding security, internet availability, simplified user interface experience of MB, customer convenience for core banking services, and transactions with minimum number of clicks.
TopIntroduction
Adoption of mobile devices has occurred since the beginning of the new millennium (Jack and Suri, 2011). This has transpired at a very fast rate (Smith, 2006, p. 18). Further, adoption of mobile devices was at one of the highest levels of penetration compared to any other consumer-level technology (Jack and Suri, 2011). Mobile devices have become popular and ubiquitous over the years (Gupta, 2011, p. 32). Financial institutions have been increasingly providing its services to customers through Mobile Banking (MB) (Mokhtar, Katan and Imdadullah, 2017). MB has been defined as a channel through which customers interacted with a bank via a mobile digital device such as a smartphone or a personal digital assistant (Laukkanen & Pasanen, 2008, p. 92). MB has emerged as an alternate channel for providing banking services (Devadevan, 2013). MB has provided the facility of payment and accounting system that enhanced the speed of delivering banking services (Pathak & Mishra, 2019). According to a report titled ‘Digital Offerings in Mobile Banking by KPMG’, mobile banking market currently consisted of a portfolio of offerings which could be classified into three broad heads namely banking services, payment services and value-added services (Mobile Banking, 2015). In the age of digitalization, MB has provided a scope to cater to reach both the top and bottom of the pyramid in the banking business through a variety of service offerings (Balakrishan,2016). MB has been considered to be safe and secured because banking transactions were encrypted as well as password protected (Salem and Rashid, 2011).
Indian consumers have been gradually accepting MB (Mobile Banking, 2015). Indian market though had been over the years chaotic, complex and booming (Bhattacharyya et al., 2012, p. 76) but was competitive (Bhattacharyya, 2011, p. 15). According to Juniper Research’s report titled ‘Mobile & Online Banking: Developed & Developing Market Strategies 2014-2019’, emerging and developing economy countries such as China, India and Bangladesh witnessed significant growth in MB in the past few years (Juniperresearch.com, 2014). It has been estimated that MB users would exceed 1.75 billion by the year 2019, representing 32 percent of the global adult population (Bhas, 2014). Customers were likely to develop a positive attitude to adopt MB services if they found that the services to be useful and beneficial to them in their daily transactional activities (Chung & Kwon, 2009, p. 540).
It would be important to ascertain why this study is required. This would be because MB adoption has often been challenging. It was advocated that Indian banks were required to target non-online banking users who might lack regular access to desktop internet (Vyas,2009). Such segment of population was very likely to own a mobile device, which presented a great opportunity for MB in India. The significance of MB was resident in providing financial services in areas where physically banking facilities weren’t easily accessible (Klien and Mayer, 2014). However, there were certain inherent challenges in MB services which didn’t solve the purpose it was originally meant for (Bamoriya and Singh,2012). MB often provided customers convenience and reduced the number of customers visits to bank branches substantially (Ozili, 2018, p. 339). However, these weren’t fully accomplished (Bamoriya and Singh,2012). It has been argued that adoption of mobile banking wouldn’t take place unless customers perceived the service to be useful (Ali & Bharadwaj, 2010, p. 298). Consumers generally transacted by (online/mobile banking), if they found the prospects of convenience and security to exist (Comninos, A., Esselaar, S., Ndiwalana, A., & Stork, C., 2008). Indian mobile banking users were especially concerned with security issues like financial frauds, account misuse and to some extent user friendliness issues (Sharma and Singh, 2009). Thus, in the Indian context an extensive research on MB adoption was much required. This was the study objective. The significance of this study was twofold. Firstly, the study explored what factors inhibited mobile banking technology adoption for Indian consumers. Second, the study through a comprehensive research examined the factors that promoted Indian consumers’ adoption of mobile banking services in India