Critical Factors Of Usage Intention Of Mobile Banking

As one of the most typical representatives for mobile commerce, Mobile banking is becoming increasingly important in business. Despite perfect technology and infrastructure, a large group of potential users and the comfortable circumstances of developing the industry, Mobile banking has a small share of the total electronic banking market. Internet banking is still the main way of the use of financial services, of which the primary reason is the low public acceptance. This study proposes a theoretical model that integrates three streams of research (the decomposed theory of planned behavior, self-congruity and function-congruiry) to explain the behavioral intention to use mobile banking. The survey sample is144customers. The results are as follows.Firstly, individual intentions towards mobile banking can be explained only by attitude and perceived behavioral control. Subjective norm does not significantly influence intension. This is due to the mobile banking’s individualization characteristic. Customer decide to use mobile banking by their owe factors instead of the opinions of others.Secondly, both functional factors and symbolic factors affect customer attitude toward mobile banking to different extent. The determinants of customer attitude to mobile banking include actual self-congruity, ideal self-congruity and perceived usefulness. But functional congruity, perceived ease of use and perceived credibility have little impact on customer attitude. There are several reasons for this. First of all, the aim of using mobile banking is the usefulness of this service which means that mobile banking will improve our efficiency in our lives and work. Without perceived usefulness, customers would not take into account additional factors. In addition, customers with rich user experience have a deep understanding on functional features of mobile banking. Therefore, functional congruity has more impact on customer attitude than self-congruity among experienced users. Last but not least, mobile banking is related to personal information, user accounts and passwords. Security issues and privacy issues are all critical issues for mobile banking users. However, the subjects of the questionnaire of this study are those who have little experience with mobile banking or just make micropayment by mobile banking business. Therefore, perceived credibility has less impact on customer attitude than other factors. Thirdly, external influence is the antecedents of subjective norm. It might be because that it is also at an elementary step regarding mobile banking’s understanding in our country. The mainstream media is the main means to customer to get information about mobile banking.Fourthly, both self-efficacy and facilitating conditions have significant influence at perceived behavioral control. In real life, especially among inexperienced customers, self-efficacy, like self-congruity and perceived usefulness, is a critical factor of customer behavior intention of using mobile banking.Based on above studies and conclusion, this study also makes a number of the corresponding countermeasures and suggestions which give reference for developing marketing strategy.Firstly, the enterprise should pay attention to both product features propaganda and product image propaganda during marketing strategy developing. During the initial promotional period, customer segmentation will improve the success rate of marketing activities. Customers with high self-congruity that tend to seek to products and services are the mobile banking’s target customers. This is because the companies need only a small amount of marketing resources to attract these customers.Secondly, inquiry business and account management are the most frequently used in a number of mobile banking services ongoing. Expending client business such as mobile payment and investment finance could increase the customer perception of mobile banking’s usefulness.Thirdly, during the promotional period, the limitation of customer ability should be taken into full account. The companies ought to upgrade mobile banking system step by step.The subjects of the questionnaire of this study are the groups of young people from Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai area. Further studies can be further conducted among customers in boarder geographical areas. In this study, self-congruity is divided into actual self-congruity and ideal self-congruity. Future studies might focus on the influence of social self-congruity and ideal social self-congruity on customer behavior.