Extending the Technology Acceptance Model for Sms Banking: Analyzing the Gender Gap among Students

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to investigate the moderating effects of gender on students in explaining intention to use SMS banking. For this purpose, the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is employed as the base model and develops a proper version of TAM to reflect SMS banking context. This is achieved by examining the perceived expressiveness, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, social norm and perceived system quality. The findings reveal that perceived expressiveness, perceived ease of use and social norm are the important determinants for intention to use SMS banking among female students. Where as, perceived usefulness and perceived system quality are the important determinants to use SMS banking among male students. Empirically, attitude towards the use of SMS banking is significant for both male-female students at α=0.05. However, attitudes had strong effect on intention to use SMS banking for male students with β=0.372 than female students with β=0.268. Overall, this study presents an understanding on male-female students' intention to use SMS banking, and how gender moderates the extended model of SMS banking. Consequently, banks can better target the marketing campaign on how to attract male-female students to use SMS banking. Keywords: TAM; SMS banking; University's students. I. INTRODUCTION SMS banking is defined as a banking transaction in the form of short-messaging-service (SMS) by the use of mobile phone. In the past, SMS is evolved among people as a key social memo to connect with family members, friends, and teachers. Today, SMS is also evolved as a medium that disseminates banking information to make individual contact with banks better. Thus, SMS banking or mobile banking has been become a central field of study by several researchers (see Karjaluoto, et al., 2002; Howcroft, et al., 2002; Mattila, 2003; Laforet and Li, 2005 and Wan, et al., 2005). However, TAM has received little attention from these studies although many have argued the importance to investigate the respondents' attitude towards the use of mobile banking. In these studies, there are three unexplored aspects that will be discussed further in this study: (a) the determinants of behavioral intention to use mobile banking based on TAM, (b) these studies have focused on general population rather than students as a sample and (c) using gender as a moderator is not fully focused in these studies. Several studies have put emphasis on the importance of elaborating individual behavioral intentions by using TAM as the base model (see Darley and Smith, 1995; Gefen and Straub, 1997; Venkatesh and Morris, 2000; Moon and Kim, 2001; and Chiu, et al., 2005) to mention a few, following the theoretical models such as the TAM (Davis, 1989). Each of these studies examines different influences on the formation of beliefs regarding perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and so on. Given the belief recurrence in theoretical models of male-female students' behavioral intention towards SMS banking, additional work is required to combine these theories and compare the differences from a male-female students' perspective. However these studies have ignored the importance of using students as a sample, although they employed TAM. In response to this, some of the present studies that conducted in Labuan have chosen a particular consumer segment, namely university's student in their observations. This has due to the several reasons. First, once graduates begin their careers, they generally enjoy a higher salary compared with non-graduates of the same age. Second, as graduates would normally expect to have a more progressive career, so their income should be generally higher than non-graduates of the same age. Third, graduates may be considered as being more financially sophisticated and hence will use a wider range of financial services as they pass through their own life cycle (Thwaites and Vere, 1995). …