Investigating mobile money transfer adoption in South Africa: applying an adapted diffusion of innovations model

Research Report Presented to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management of the University of the Witwatersrand in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Commerce (Coursework) in the field of Information Systems, October 2018Banks in South Africa have joined other banks around the globe in a bid to expand customer self-service and digitization of services through mobile technology. Together with various approaches to increase self-service practices, financial institutions have identified the need to ensure financial inclusion, especially in developing countries. Despite the growth in mobile technology usage in developing countries, the uptake of mobile banking services, specifically mobile money transfers (MMTs), has not achieved the anticipated growth. Various studies have been conducted in order to understand how adoption of mobile banking and MMTs can be engendered in developing countries in order to achieve financial inclusion. South Africa is such a country, where mobile technology has been adopted to a great degree but with a low adoption of MMTs. This study examined the applicability of an adapted Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) framework, in comparison to the base DOI model, to investigate factors influencing the adoption of MMTs in South Africa. This study assessed the relationships of Relative Advantage, Complexity, Compatibility, Trialability, Observability and Trust with Behavioural Intention to adopt MMTs. The adapted model was found to marginally account for the variance in behavioural intention to adopt MMTs in comparison to the base DOI model and can therefore be considered as an applicable model. Relative Advantage, Compatibility and Trust were found to be significant factors, while Complexity, Observability and Trialability were found to have insignificant effects on the Behavioural Intention to adopt MMTs.XL201