Customer adoption of self-service channels in South African banking.

MBA 2014ABSTRACT Much research in various contexts has been conducted since the mid-1970’s under the theme of technology adoption. There has been a rise in the number of research studies pursued on the subject of self-service banking adoption as these channels have emerged and evolved through technological advances of the past three decades. Previous research findings have shown there to be various factors which influence the adoption and use of these self-service technologies, leading to five foundational technology adoption theories, namely Diffusion of Innovation theory, Theory of Reasoned Action, Theory of Planned Behaviour, Technology Acceptance and the Decomposed Theory of Planned Behaviour, the totality of which formed the theoretical framework for this study. The research is justified in a South African context, as very limited research has been conducted in the field of self-service banking adoption, specifically across multiple channels. This study investigated the relative influence on the likely adoption of six factors, namely perceived risk, perceived behavioural control, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, subjective norms and compatibility across four channels, specifically mobile (Cellphone) banking, mobile app banking, ATM banking and internet banking. A quantitative research design was applied, with data collected from a cross-sectional survey through Qualtrics, a web-based survey tool, from a sample of 298 respondents broadly representative of the population of banking customers. Item constructs were reliability tested via the Cronbach Alpha statistic. From the twenty-two questions asked, two were found invalid on the Perceived Risk factor and one on the Perceived Ease of Use factor. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the six factors validity, and only three were found to be valid for self-service banking channels in general. The other channels had different permutations of valid factors, with consistency, for the most part, amongst the three general, valid ones. Those found to be valid were Perceived usefulness, Compatibility and Behavioural Control. Future research should focus on exploring new and emergent factors which would influence self-service banking adoption, broadening the sample to be more inclusive, and contrasting the impact of living standards as a consequence of income, on the various factors outlined here