The influence of religion on Islamic mobile phone banking services adoption

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the effects religious affiliation and commitment have on Southeast Asian young adults' intention to adopt Islamic mobile phone banking.Design/methodology/approachAn online self‐administered survey was distributed to Southeast Asian young adults through convenience and snowball sampling and a total of 135 responses obtained.FindingsThe study found Islamic mobile phone banking to be a novelty service, with little consumer awareness and experience, especially among non‐Muslims. Religious affiliation and commitment were both effective segmentation strategies, as differences in adoption intention were found between Muslims and non‐Muslims, as well as devout and casually religious Muslims. Overall, devout Muslims were socially‐oriented with their adoption criteria whereas casually religious and non‐Muslims relied upon the utilitarian attributes.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the existing mobile banking adoption literature by providing evidence of consumers' adoption intentions toward Islamic mobile phone banking. It also uses religious commitment in addition to affiliation as segmentation tools, an approach which has not been used in previous Islamic mobile banking research.

The Effects of Following Islam in Decisions about Taboo Products

“…Yet, religion has long been acknowledged as a strong influence on consumers’ decision making. Religion has been found to help explain consumers’ choice in using products and their response to advertising appeals (Fam, Waller, & Erdogan, ; Hirschman, ; Sun, Goh, Fam, & Xue, ).…”

Behavioral Intention Towards “Halal Hotels”: Religiosity or Ethnicity?

“…TRA is open to modification or extension by altering the path and including additional predictors if it can be shown to capture a greater proportion of variance in intention after the original constructs have been taken into account [31]. This theory is appropriate for this study as it has been shown to be applicable in various other contexts of Islamic marketing such as in the halal food purchasing [35,36], Islamic insurance [37], Islamic pawn shops [38], Islamic home financing [39], Islamic personal financing [37], Islamic credit cards [40] and Islamic mobile phone banking [41].…”

Islamic House Financing in Pakistan: A Demand Analysis

“…Few researchers found that religious factor significantly influence the demand for such services (Metawa & Almossawi, 1998;Lee & Ullah, 2011), while other claimed that religious factor does not affect customer's decision of selecting a bank (Erol & El-Bdour, 1989;Amin et al, 2011;Ghauri et al, 2012). Some studies also found that very few bank customers select Islamic banks strictly due to religion whereas majority of them select Islamic banks due to non religious reasons (Gerrard & Cunningham, 1997;Abdul Hamid & Azmin, 2001;Sun et al, 2012).…”

“…However, while exploring the influence of religion on demand for phone banking services offered by Islamic banks, Sun et al (2012) found that only faithful Muslims prefer Islamic banks due to religious reasons whereas heedlessly religious Muslims and non-Muslims consider utility attributes of the products. In Malaysia, another study explored the factors which encourage bank customer to prefer Islamic banks over conventional banks.…”