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Introduction
With the increasing penetration of mobile and smartphones globally, the use of various mobile services, including banking, have attained greater significance. In India, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has issued operative guidelines for mobile banking (m-banking) and has recommended that this new medium can be used to extend banking services to the unbanked segment of the country. Recent RBI statistics revealed an increase in acceptance of m-banking, as the volume of m-banking transactions increased by 256 times since 2011. In December 2015 alone, a total of 39.5 million m-banking transactions with a volume of INR 490 billion were transacted in India. This reflects that consumers are adopting this new way of banking. However, this only represents 22.23 percent of the volume as compared to transactions through automated teller machines (ATMs) (INR 2,204 billion) during the same period. A deeper analysis reveals that only four (State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and Axis Bank) out of 64 banks offering m-banking services account for 88.11 percent of the total volume, indicating that the customers across all banks have yet to adopt the m-banking services, or are resisting the use of this new technology.
In this paper, we use an emerging consumer behavior model, behavioral reasoning theory (BRT) (Westaby, 2005b), to understand the consumers' intention to adopt m-banking. Extant research has independently examined antecedents of m-banking adoption (Afshan and Sharif, 2016; Lin, 2011; Oliveira et al. , 2014), as well as barriers that prevent consumers from using m-banking (Brahim, 2015; Laukkanen and Kiviniemi, 2010; Yu and Chantatub, 2015). Drawing from BRT, this study aims to examine the role of determinants and barriers in m-banking adoption in a single framework. Specifically, we investigate consumers' values, attitudes and "reasons for" and "reasons against," that influence consumers' decisions to adopt m-banking. In the following section, we provide an overview of m-banking and BRT, and then outline the proposed model and testable hypothesis. The detailed research methodology is then followed by results, discussion and implications for marketers.
Literature review
Emergence of m-banking
Shaikh and Karjaluoto (2015) define m-banking as "A product or service offered by a bank or a microfinance institution for conducting financial and non-financial transactions using a mobile device, namely mobile phone, smartphone, or tablet." M-banking...