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Introduction
The adoption rate of mobile technologies in businesses has been remarkably growing in the past several years, and the use of this advanced technology has changed the shape of how customers and service providers are engaged in the service delivery process. The banking industry is no exception. The financial industry has been known as one of the early adopters of mobile technologies, which have brought drastic changes to the industry's multi-channel (e.g. offline, online, and phone banking) service environment and its business models (Laukkanen, 2007). This mobile computing with wireless networking has enabled banks to offer their customers highly value-added services, such as convenience, interactivity, and ability to access financial services without geographical and time constraints, namely mobile banking (m-banking) (Cruz et al. , 2010; Laukkanen, 2007; Shih et al. , 2010). The current success in m-banking has been identified as one of the major factors that caused a record number of bank branch office closures in the USA. For example, SNL Financial LC reported nearly 1,500 net branch closings in the year 2012, which is the largest number ever reported by this organization (Anderson, 2014).
M-banking has significantly contributed to improving the bottom line of many banks, as the average transaction cost for m-banking is just about one-fiftieth of that for traditional brick-and-mortar banking, one-tenth of that for ATMs, and one-half of that for online banking (Deloitte, 2010). Moreover, m-banks, over the mobile network, have been able to expand their market territories, and better understand and meet customers' banking needs by analyzing data collected through the impersonal linkages between customers' mobile devices and their computer systems. As a result, m-banking customers are able to perform financial transactions anytime and anywhere in the world (Cruz et al. , 2010; Laukkanen, 2007) and enjoy convenient service features such as real-time notifications (Deloitte, 2010).
According to one recent US Federal Reserve report, the number of m-banking customers reached 51 percent of all smartphone owners in the USA in 2013, up from 48 percent in 2012 (US Federal Reserve, 2014). It is also predicted that m-banking users would surpass those of online banking by 2020 (Deloitte, 2010). With the increasing popularity of m-banking services among customers, m-banks have already engaged in stiff competition in their efforts to...