An investigation into the determinants of user acceptance of personalization in online banking

Acknowledgement I want to thank my supervisors, Dr. T. M. van der Geest and Dr. ir. P. W. de Vries for their kind support, input and guidance throughout the duration of this work. I am grateful to all my family and friends who have supported and encouraged me throughout this time. I also want to thank my wonderful wife for all her encouragement and sacrifice and lastly I would like to thank God for making it all possible and see me through it all. Personalization is an innovative strategy which enables the bank to further differentiate from its competitors by drawing the client into increasingly deeper levels of mutually beneficial relationships. However for any personalization effort to succeed both the bank and its clients need to perceive it as being relevant and beneficial to their interests. The bank needs the clients implicit and explicit consent to use their personal data to enable them tailor the clients experience to suit s/he's purposes as well as meet their goals. On the other hand the client needs to see its relevance and desirability as well as trust the bank to deliver what it promises. Since such decisions are based on previous experience, a major determinant of success of the personalization effort is thus a function of the client's perception of the bank and their current relationship with it. Consequently in this research we have focused on understanding the underlying factors involved in the client's relationship with the bank and how they influence the acceptance of five concrete personalization features, namely adaptive login feature, adaptable settings, emails, adaptive banners adverts and adaptive financial advice. We adopted this approach because we view personalization as a relationship marketing strategy and therefore propose that the basic underlying factors in relationship marketing would be major determinants of acceptance of personalization. We used the Commitment-Trust Theory (Morgan and Hunt, 1994) and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 1985) as analytical tools to model the relationship between the basic relationship marketing constructs and the specific highlighted personalization features. We added the variable Control (data) to our models because it has been indicated in research as being important in acceptance of personalization. We found that clients in general want more personalization. We also found that five variables namely, Control (self-efficacy), Control (data), Relationship terminations cost, Relationship benefit and Subjective norm were significant determinants of acceptance of personalization in online banking. At …