Predictors of Online Insurance Service Use Intentions Among Young Consumers

Today, consumers are increasingly expecting services independent of time and location. This change in consumer demands requires financial operators to invest in their online services to keep up with the market changes. While most young consumers in Finland adopt online banking services, online insurance services are falling behind the financial industry market trend. Thus, insurance companies need to develop their online services to correspond to the changing consumer behaviour. Drawing on the extant literature on technology acceptance, this study aims to explain the predictors of consumer intention to adopt complex services with high credence qualities in online environment. While online banking adoption has received substantial attention among Information Systems scholars, there is limited evidence of the results’ applicability in the complex credence services requiring high cognition involvement to process the subject content of the task. This study addresses this gap by expanding the research context and introduces a new moderator variable of subject knowledge to assess the effect of the consumer’s subject knowledge on the use intentions of online services, where consumer is a co-creator of the service. The study utilizes extended Unified Technology Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as the basis of the research framework. The empirical data is collected via third party distributed online survey yielding 284 valid responses. Quantitative methods are used for the analysis, with two-step covariance-based structural equation modelling (CB-SEM) approach and three separate multi-group analyses. Complementary analysis is conducted to further explain the relationship between the background variables, subject knowledge, and use intentions. The findings support the predominant view that consumers adopt technologies that provide value with enhanced performance expectancy. Effort expectancy has a strong impact on the performance expectancy and together, they explain 91% of the consumer opinion about online insurance services. Altogether, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, facilitating condition, price value, and habit predict 88% of the variance on consumer use intentions. Gender, experience, and subject knowledge present significant moderator effect among the respondents. Furthermore, the findings provide novel insights on the impact of high subject knowledge increasing technology adoption in high credence service context. Only half of the respondents demonstrated to hold an adequate level of subject knowledge and therefore prefer channels with human contact, where burden of the task is not placed as consumer’s liability. Accordingly, the research suggests several methods to overcome the challenges and to increase consumer acceptance of online insurance services