Current practices and actual barriers of adopting internet banking : a survey study

Abstract EN

Information and Communication Technology have brought about many changes in almost all facets of life.

In the Banking Industry, it has been in the form of online banking, which is now replacing the traditional banking practice.

Online banking has a lot of benefits which add value to customers’ satisfaction in terms of better quality of service offerings and at the same time enable the banks to gain more competitive advantage over other competitors.

Despite the benefits to the customer of online banking, its use has not reached a satisfactory level in the State of Qatar.

So this study to highlights the obstacles and to attempts to identify the barriers that are preventing customers from using Internet Banking (IB) and the reasons behind this.

By doing so, this will help banks to breakdown the barrier and reach out to its customers.

A self – administered questionnaire was developed and distributed to a sample size of 600 students from Qatar University using Stratified random sampling modes.

Data analysis was then based on 423 valid responses.

The researcher has found that a significant number of respondents are not aware of the IB services.

Hence, this paper therefore, examines potential factors identified to be barriers for internet banking adoption, and to examine the perceptions of respondents towards the reasons for not currently using Internet Banking.

The data analysis reveals that ‘the risk and security’, ‘no human interaction’, and ‘not interested’ were identified as the major barriers preventing the respondents from using internet banking in Qatar.

Four other factors such as ‘difficult to use’, ‘no Benefits’, and ‘no necessity’, and ‘time consuming’ were considered as miniature barriers which did not have a strong influence.

The findings of this paper can be useful reference for the banking industry to improve their business and for further future research.

The study contributes to the literature on the internet banking services in domestic area.