INTRODUCTIONThe bursting of the Internet bubble in early 2001 has generated numerous speculations that the opportunities for Internet services firms have vanished. The dot.com companies and Internet players have been struggling for survival, and most of the related businesses are still suffering losses. Practicing managers and academics have not yet reached a consensus in their debate about this new technology: whether the Internet brings about a revolutionary change in the fundamental way we do business or whether it is only an evolutionary process, offering simply a new distribution channel and communication medium (Moe and Fader, 2001). According to Brown (2001), the “New Economy” or e-commerce businesses are still at the infancy stage. Despite the crash of dot.com stock prices in March 2001, Internet usage and e- commerce have continued to grow at a fast pace.According to eMarketer (2003), the US B2C e-commerce revenues reached US$70 billion in 2002, compared to US$51 billion in 2001, i.e., a jump of 37%. It also predicted that by 2003, the e-commerce revenues would increase by 28% to US$90 billion; another 21% increase to US$109 billion by 2004; and to US$133 billion, a further 22% increase, by 2005. Compared with the global economic growth of less than 5%, and the forecast GDP growth of 1%-2% for Hong Kong in 2003, the predicted e-commerce growth of 28% is very encouraging. The anticipated explosive growth of online purchases via the Internet will present immense opportunities to businesses in general, and Internet Banking (IB) in particular.In this study we use the terms IB and Online Banking (OB) interchangeably. IB/OB is different from Electronic Banking (e-banking) in that the latter is a higher level activity that encompasses not only IB/OB, but also Telephone Banking, ATM, WAP-banking and other electronic payment systems that are not operated through the Internet. We focus on IB
2
because it is widely seen as the most important and most popular delivery channel for banking services in the cyber age.
Banks can benefit from much lower operating costs by offering IB services, which require less staff and fewer physical branches. Customers will also benefit from the convenience, speed and round-the-clock availability of IB services. However, IB has not taken off in Hong Kong as spectacularly as expected. According to ACNielsen and NetRatings (2003), 522,700 people in Hong Kong visited an IB site from their home PC in January 2003 (out of 2,194,600 active Internet users), representing a penetration rate of only 23.8%. To realize the full potential of IB, banks need to develop new products and services to fully utilize the Internet’s capabilities. On the other hand, customers need to be made aware of IB services, and feel secure and comfortable with using such services as the new IB operating procedures are radically different from those they are used to.
There is a clear need to study the factors that influence customers’ intention to adopt IB so that banks can better formulate their marketing strategies to increase IB usage in the future. This study aims to investigate the behavioral intention of customers to use IB services with a focus on users’ perceptions of ease of use and usefulness of IB, and of security of using this new technology to meet their banking needs. In Section 2, we present a review of the literature on innovation diffusion and technology adoption, based on which we propose a model of customers’ intention to adopt IB, and formulate the associated research hypotheses. We discuss the research methodology in Section 3, and present the findings from the analysis of the empirical data in Section 4. Section 5 concludes the paper with discussions of the limitations of the study, managerial implications and further research directions.
3
đang được dịch, vui lòng đợi..
