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ABSTRACT: To meet customer's expectations and needs, electronic banking services have allowed financial transactions to simplify and have increased their attractiveness. Over the past few year, in order to increase customer comfort and maintain profitability, banks around the world have adopted innovative banking technologies and modern e-banking services, such as internet and mobile banking. As a matter of fact, banking over mobile phones is the newest e-banking service with several benefits for both customers and banks. The paper aims to provide an overview of the latest electronic financial channel, underlining various aspects of mobile banking as it represents a key distribution channel for a growing number of customers.
KEY WORDS: banking, e-banking, mobile banking, m-banking.
JEL CLASSIFICATIONS: G21.
1.INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, the very nature of banking is changing as consumers require more personalised banking products and services and have become less willing to visit traditional branches for routine transactions. In addition, they are demanding better service quality and are looking for simplicity in their day-to-day banking. Thus, traditional banking is more and more threatened as digital channels grow in popularity. Since customers have become more receptive to new electronic channels, the face-toface sales and service interactions are declining.
Today, as new technologies emerged, customers have more options regarding when and where they can do their banking. Electronic banking, usually referred as ebanking, is the newest delivery channel for banking services and includes home banking, PC banking, internet banking, mobile banking. Electronic banking services have been around for quite some time in the form of telephone transactions or ATMs (Nsouli & Schaechter, 2002). In more recent years, modern e-banking services, such as internet and mobile banking, have revolutionized banking transactions, allowing customers to be connected anywhere, anytime (Drigă & Isac, 2014). The development of mobile banking has endowed the banking industry with new business models able to provide appropriate self-service banking alternatives to their customers.
2.CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND
Electronic banking is seen as one of the most successful business-to-consumer applications in electronic commerce (Laukkanen, 2007). First, research focused on customers' behaviour toward ATMs, phone banking (home banking) and PC banking. Recent studies however have investigated the development of internet banking and the most recent literature has shown a growing interest in the world for mobile payment services.