Customer Trust as a Determinant of Behavioural Intention towards FinTech-Based Banking Services

Abstract

In order to convince customers in Kerala to incorporate FinTech services into their day-to-day financial activities, FinTech service providers face a number of obstacles, including a lack of awareness, competition, regulations, concerns about data privacy, and cyber security. As a result, the purpose of this study was to investigate and comprehend how Keralites customers viewed FinTech services. Privacy enablers and inhibitors were added to the unified theory of technology acceptance and utilization. In this study, partial least square structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses. The findings, which were based on the responses of 361 FinTech users from Kerala, who took part in the study, indicated that privacy enablers, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and facilitating condition have a significant and positive impact on users’ behavioural discrimination against FinTech services. The findings also revealed that users’ behavioural discrimination toward FinTech services was largely unaffected by privacy blockers and social influencers. Overall, the findings suggested that practitioners and service providers of fintech should take a governance approach to developing trustworthy fintech applications based on the information richness that can help build consumer trust and account for the privacy enablers on a broader level. By including privacy enablers and privacy inhibitors in the model, the current study expands the unified theory of technology acceptance and use to better comprehend consumers’ behavioural discrimination toward FinTech services and broadens the scope of existing research. The banking industry has been significantly altered by the rapid spread of financial technology, which has improved service efficiency and accessibility. However, in environments marked by perceived risk, privacy concerns, and cybersecurity threats, customer adoption of FinTech-based banking services remains dependent on trust. Customer trust is examined in this study as a factor in behavioural intention toward FinTech-based banking services, utilizing primary data gathered from bank customers who make regular use of services enabled by FinTech. Performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, customer trust, and behavioural intention are the subjects of the study. The results demonstrate that influence on customer trust has a significant positive impact on behavior intention.