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In recent decades, information and communication technologies have broken geographical, regulatory, and industrial barriers, generating new products, services, and market opportunities (Liao & Cheung, 2002). In the financial services industry, different technologies such as automatic teller machines (ATMs), electronic transfers, electronic cash cards, the Internet, and mobile phones have radically changed the delivery channels used to provide the elaborated services to existing or potential customers.
Known as e-banking, the use of bank websites and other electronic means through which customers access their banking accounts and conduct financial transactions has great value for both banks and consumers (Yu et al., 2015). On the one hand, e-banking facilitates the e-commerce and e-government activities of customers (Garín-Muñoz et al., 2017) and allows them to complete their banking operations with speed and convenience at the time and place of their choosing (Anouze & Alamro, 2019; Siadat et al., 2019). On the other hand, e-banking offers precious opportunities to banks to attain competitive advantage and reach higher levels of efficiency, especially by saving costs, fulfilling customers’ expectations, and attracting new prospective customers (Poon, 2008; Salimon et al., 2017; Takieddine & Sun, 2015).
In developing countries, these benefits are all the more important, as access to banks and banking services is unequal and internet and smartphones have reached high penetration rates among populations. Nevertheless, as an information system project, e-banking development is characterized by a high risk of failure (Pan et al., 2008; Bellahcene et al, 2020). Indeed, the success of this kind of project is influenced by different organizational, technological, and environmental factors, of which consumer response is crucial (Ray et al., 2005; Strassmann, 1997; Wang et al., 2008).
Despite these different advantages, experience has shown that the e-banking adoption rate is very low in developing countries when compared with that of developed nations (Salimon et al., 2017). In Algeria, even with the huge projects initiated to implement e-banking systems, currency in circulation continues to increase, and most commercial bank consumers continue to conduct banking transactions using traditional channels. Thus, it seems necessary to understand the essential factors influencing consumers’ adoption and use of e-banking services provided by Algerian commercial banks (as a case of developing countries).
Prior studies on e-banking adoption have mobilized the dominant theories of innovation adoption, such as the technology acceptance model (TAM) (Kurnia et al., 2010; Lee, 2009; Rawashdeh, 2015; Roy et al., 2017) and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) (Alalwan et al., 2017; Merhi et al., 2019; Rahi et al., 2019). Their results point out several factors causing the low rate of e-banking adoption. However, there is no universal agreement on the variables influencing e-banking adoption, and the results differ depending on place, context, and time (Cruz et al., 2010). Furthermore, the question has not been extensively examined in the context of developing countries in general and, more specifically, for the Algerian case (Bellahcene & Khedim, 2016).
Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the key factors affecting Algerian bank customers’ adoption and use of e-banking services. Specifically, this research proposes and tests an integrated model for customer adoption of e-banking based on TAM and UTAUT.