The Adoption of Mobile Banking in Malaysia: The Case of Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad (Bimb)

ABSTRACT For several years, commercial banks in Malaysia have tried to introduce mobile banking systems to improve their operations and reduce transaction costs. Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad (BIMB) is one of the commercial banks in Malaysia introduced mobile banking systems to its customers. On the basis of this argument, this research examines the factors that determine intention to use mobile banking among BIMB's customers. This work extends technology acceptance model (TAM) to include perceived credibility, the amount of information on mobile banking and normative pressure. The results indicate that perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use are strong determinants of behavioral intention to adopt mobile banking. The results also further reveal that perceived credibility, the amount of information on mobile banking and normative pressure are significant factors in explaining the acceptance of mobile banking. Significant relationship between "perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness", and "perceived ease of use and perceived credibility" are also found. Furthermore, the findings of this study are useful in order to disseminate important guidelines for BIMB in promoting the use of mobile banking among its customers. Keywords: Malaysia; Banking; Mobile banking; Communication technologies; Technology acceptance; Islam. I. INTRODUCTION The rapid technological advances in mobile-based technologies have created opportunities for new and innovative mobile services. Some of the most promising, while still marginally adopted, is mobile banking. Many commercial banks in Malaysia have tried to introduce mobile banking systems to improve their operations and reduce costs. BIMB is one of the commercial banks in Malaysia actively promotes the use of mobile banking. In the banking industry, bank branches alone are no longer adequate to provide banking services to cater the needs of demanding customers. Therefore, the provision of banking services through mobile banking has provided an alternative means to acquire banking services very convenience and timely to bank customers. Despite all the efforts aimed at developing better mobile banking, this system can easily be remained unnoticed by bank customers, despite its availability. Mobile banking is still new, leaving a great deal of room for development in Malaysia. There is a need, therefore, to understand bank customers' acceptance of mobile banking and to examine the factors affecting their intentions to use mobile banking. This information can assist commercial banks including BIMB in building of mobile banking that the bank customers want to use, thus assist them to attract potential users to use the system. Nevertheless, the TAM is chosen in this study for two main reasons. First, choosing TAM is based on its parsimony and predictive power which make it easy to apply in different information system devices (Guriting and Ndubisi, 2006; Pikkarainen, et al., 2004; Kleijnen, et al., 2004; and Venkatesh and Morris, 2000). Second, TAM helps to better understand the relationship between five important constructs of the study, notably, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived credibility, the amount of information on mobile banking, normative pressure with behavioral intention. The aim of this paper is to investigate factors that influence BIMB customers' adoption of mobile banking. For the purpose, TAM is used as the base model for the study and modified it to better reflect the mobile banking context. In the original TAM's model, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use are addressed as the most important constructs in predicting information system (IS) acceptance. Many researchers have also investigated and agreed that these two constructs are valid in understanding individual's intention to adopt IS (Guriting and Ndubisi, 2006; Luarn and Lin, 2005; and Wang, et al., 2003). However, depending on the specific technology context, additional constructs are required to be integrated to better reflect newly emerging technologies. …