Investigating the role of unified theory of acceptance and use of technology ( UTAUT ) in internet banking adoption context

Article history: Received: November 26, 2017 Received in revised format: November 26, 2017 Accepted: January 18, 2018 Available online: January 18, 2018 Several studies have made known that internet banking (IB) implementation is not only advantageous for banks, but also by perception and experience of IB users. Therefore, little is known about factors propelling user’s intention to adopt internet banking in Pakistan. Thus, the purpose of this research is to investigate the role of unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) in internet banking adoption context. A quantitative approach based survey was conducted to collect the data from 398 internet banking users. For statistical analysis structural equation model (SEM) approach was used. The result of this study indicates that, UTAUT model provided a good theoretical foundation in technology adoption investigation. Findings confirmed that all four predictors (performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating condition) were significant and had significant amount of variance in predicting user’s intention to adopt internet banking. Additionally, the IPMA test revealed that performance expectancy was the most important factor among all other variables to predict user’s intention towards adoption of internet banking. Lastly, managerial implications, limitations and future recommendations are discussed. © 2018 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada


Introduction
E-Commerce is an application of information technology to facilitate business exchanges among different parties.The first online banking service which introduced the internet banking was established in 1994 by Stanford Federal Credit Union (SFCU).According to Yoon (2010) internet banking involves provision of facilities such as accessing accounts, funds transfer, and buying financial products or services online.Internet banking is a banking channel that allows consumers to do a wide range of financial and nonfinancial services through a bank's website (Hoehle et al., 2012).
Internet banking is forecasted to grow sharply within the next few years, affecting the competitive advantage enjoyed by traditional branch bank (Samar et al., 2017).These days in competitive business environment, companies must understand that customers hold the key to success (Alnaser et al., 2018).For banks, technology has emerged as a strategic resource for achieving higher efficiency, control of operations, productivity and profitability.For customers, it is the understanding of their anywhere, anytime, anyway banking dream.At the basic level, Internet banking can mean setting up of a web page by a bank to give information about its product and services.At an advance level, it involves provision of facilities such as accessing accounts, funds transfer, and buying financial products or services online.This is called "transactional" online banking (Sathye, 1999).The Internet is believed to change the way firms interact with their customers and thus the way they initiate, develop and terminate relationships with them (Rahi & Ghani, 2016).
Customer choose internet banking because it is convenient and have speedy action (Gupta et al., 2008).Now trend has changed for customer internet banking is convenient while for banking it is a source of cost reduction and better customer service.Liao and Cheung (2002) explained, one of the major forces behind the changes happening to business is technology, which is creating new products, services market opportunities and developing more information and system oriented business and management processes.Information technology is a powerful tool or enabler in the arena of customer service.Weick and Quinn (1999) argued that, with new technologies executives can manage the strategic elements to achieve competitive advantage with minimum transaction costs.Internet banking would help banks present a potentially low cost banking transaction system.
Owing to the adoption of internet banking services will not only beneficial for banks but it will also give the opportunity to banks to satisfy their customers from a distance (Xue et al., 2011).In spite of this, banks are still finding difficulties to fully maximize their operations and this attributes to customer's unwillingness to adopt internet banking irrespective of the benefits (Martins et al., 2014).Thus, the present study investigates the role of UTAUT in internet banking adoption context.Practically this study will help managers understand customer behaviours and their intentions on how they can perform a transaction via online system that is convenient and cost effective, meanwhile policy makers will get deep insight of their clients that why majority of the banking customers are reluctant to use internet banking.

Theoretical Background
Several studies exist that explore adoption issues of technology therefore, very little research has been done on internet banking adoption issues (Rahi et al., 2017).The most known technology acceptance model (TAM) was designed to investigate the user acceptance of information technology.Basically, TAM is an adaptation of theory of reasoned action (TRA) that proposed system use evaluate by intention of use which is further influenced by attitude and perceived usefulness.Attitude and Perceived usefulness are affected by Perceived ease of usefulness.Perceived usefulness, where user salient belief will be helpful for improving the performance.According to Taylor and Todd (1995) perceived ease of usefulness is a situation where user acts stress free while using of technology.Further research was conducted by other researchers and developed a new model of technology adoption namely; Unified Theory of Acceptance and use of Technology (UTAUT).Since 2003, researchers have applied and tested UTATU model to understand the user's behaviour towards adoption of technology.It was incorporated to understand online bulletin boards study by Marchewka et al. (2007), instant messengers study by Lin and Anol (2008), and Web-based learning by Chiu and Wang (2008).In internet banking adoption context was studied by Tan et al. (2010).UTAUT model was also studied in cultural context, Im et al. (2011) underpinned the UTAUT model in comparing mp3 player and Internet banking technologies in Korea and the US, while , Yuen et al. (2010) tested the UTAUT model in two groups, that were culturally different i.e. the developed (US and Australia) and developing (Malaysia) countries.

UTAUT Framework
Unified theory of acceptance and use of technology is the most unique theory which includes dimensions of TRA, TAM, Motivational Model (Davis et al., 1992).TPB is a hybrid model that combines constructs of TAM and TPB (C-TAM-TPB) (Taylor & Todd, 1995), meanwhile, Model of PC Utilization (MPCU) proposed by Thompson et al. (1991), Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) by Moore and Benbasat (1996), and lastly Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) by Compeau and Higgins (1995).The UTAUT model postulates that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions are the determinants of behavioural intention of users towards adoption of technology.

Performance Expectancy
Performance expectancy (PE), where user perception of performance excel by use of Internet banking on tasks, i.e., individual believes that using Internet banking will help to attain benefits in performing banking operations (Venkatesh et al., 2003).Zhou et al. (2010) elaborated that performance expectancy reflects user's perception towards improvement by using of internet banking like convenience of payment, fast response and service effectiveness.Performance expectancy in other models was described as perceived usefulness, relative advantage, outcome expectancy and extrinsic motivation.In relation to internet banking Alalwan et al. (2014) postulated that performance expectancy is considered as term of utility that encounter during use of internet banking.Performance expectancy has been widely used in order to understand the behavioral intention of users to adopt internet banking (AbuShanab et al., 2010;Martins et al., 2014).Thus, performance expectancy is hypothesized as: H1: Performance expectancy is positively influence on user's intention to adopt internet banking.

Effort Expectancy
Effort expectancy (EE) is defined as the degree of ease relate with the use of internet banking.Effort expectancy is similar to perceived ease of use (TAM) and complexity (DOI, MPCU).Zhou et al. (2010) demonstrated that when user feels that internet banking is easy to use and does not require much effort, they would have high chances to adopt internet banking.The relationship of effort expectancy on behavioral intention has found significant (Moore & Benbasat, 1991;Thompson et al., 1991).Effort expectancy is positively affect performance expectancy for instance, when users feel that Internet banking is easy to use, and not much efforts are required they will have a high expectation towards acquiring the expected performance (Zhou et al., 2010).Thus, the relationship of effort expectancy is proposed as: H2: Effort expectancy is positively influence on user's intention to adopt internet banking.

Social Influence
Social influence (SI) is defined as the effect of environmental factors, for instance the opinions of user's friends, relatives (Venkatesh et al., 2003).Like other constructs of UTAUT social influence was derived from subjective norm, social factors and image.The comparison of eight models revealed that the relationship of social influence will be insignificant in voluntary context and becomes significant in mandatory context.According to Martins et al. (2014), social influence will affect user's intention to adopt internet banking services.Similar to this Chaouali et al. (2016) postulated that an individual who believes that important others believe his usage of new product or services will be more inclined to use these products or technology services.Thus, in views of above arguments social influence is hypothesized as: H3: Social influence is positively influence on user's intention to adopt internet banking.

Facilitating Condition
Facilitating conditions (FC) is defined as the effect of organizational and technical infrastructure to support the use of Internet banking, such as user's knowledge, ability, and resources (Venkatesh et al., 2003).Facilitation condition was similar as perceived behavioural control and compatibility.Authors like Venkatesh et al. (2012) stated that facilitating condition refers to consumers perception of the resources and support available to perform a behaviour.In order to perform internet banking users requires to have certain skills such as configuring and operating computers and connecting to the internet (Martins et al., 2014).Thus, facilitating condition is hypothesised as:

Data collection and Sampling
Quantitative approach was used to verify the influence of unified theory of acceptance and use of technology on user's intention to adopt internet banking in Pakistan.This study is followed positivists paradigm.Positivists believe in employing quantitative approaches for data analysis and support objectivity to define their ontological statements (Mazuri et al., 2017).Thus, questionnaire was developed to measure the respondent's observation and perception towards internet banking technology.The survey was conducted in two large cities namely Lahore and Islamabad in order to have an appropriate sample representativeness of the population.
For sampling, convenience sampling method was used in this study.Convenience sampling is defined as a process of data collection from population that is close at hand and easily accessible to researcher (Rahi, 2017).Hair (2003) illustrated that convenience sampling allows researcher to complete interviews or get responses in a cost effective way.Seven hundred and fifty internet banking users were approached to get their observations towards internet banking adoption.The participation was voluntary and the survey was conducted over the period of one month from 09 September 2017 to 10 October 2017.Bank staff were requested to complete the survey within a period of four week.Therefore, three hundred and ninety eight (398) valid questionnaires with a response rate of 53% were received for data analysis.

Measurement
A questionnaire was developed for the survey using construct and items from literature.The questionnaire was created and administrated in English language.The survey questionnaire is divided into two parts.The first part of the questionnaire is inquired demographic profile of the respondents.While, the second part of the questionnaire holds measurement items of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating condition and users intention to adopt internet banking and are adapted from Venkatesh et al. (2012) and Rahi et al. (2017).Each item was measured on a seven-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).

Respondent's Profile
Sample demographics are depicted in Table 1.Majority of the respondents were females (58.5%) while males were (41.5%).The age of the respondents 8.5% is for less than 20 years, 38.4% that counts at age between 21 to 30 years, 24.4% for 31 to 40 years, 12.1% for those respondents who have age between 41 to 59 years, 11.1% was customer having age 51 to 60 and above 60 there were only 5.5% respondents.
The study also assessed the education level of the respondents.Findings revealed that most of the participants had graduate level qualification (n=198, 49.7%) followed by those who had post graduate qualification (n=121, 30.4%).The number of respondents who had attended high school were only 41, and 27 respondents who had attended high school.While the participant who had qualification below high school were at the lowest level (n=11, 2.8%).These findings revealed that the educated respondents were more inclined towards internet banking as compared with uneducated respondents (below high School, 2.8%).
This study has revelaed the occupation of the respondents.The results showed that the highest number of respondets were employed (n= 223, 56%) followed by unemployed participants (n=71, 17.8%).There were only 55 respondents with self-employed title.The respondets with pensioner had the second lowest number (n=33, 8.3%) while students had the lowest number (n=16, 4%).(Ringle et al., 2015).Following twostage analytical procedure, measurement model is analysed first to assess the reliability and the validity and then structural model is tested.

Measurement Model
The measurement model was evaluated for construct reliability, indicator reliability, convergent validity and discriminant validity.Cronbach's (α) is recommended to ensure reliability therefore, Composite Reliability (CR) is also preferred (Henseler et al., 2009).

Convergent Validity
Convergent validity is ascertained by examining indicator loadings.Fig. 2 depicted results where, factor loading values supported by Chin (1998) as recommended threshold level of 0.6.All the values were above than 0.6 which indicate the convergent validity.

Fig. 2. Measurement model
Convergent validity of measurement model is also assessed through average variance extracted and compost reliability.The average variance extracted that reflects the overall amount of variance in the indicators accounted for latent construct.Further to this measurement model needs to be assess composite reliability.Thus, the convergent validity was confirmed through estimation of average variance extracted (AVE) by recommended values of Fornell and Larcker (1981) as it must be greater than 0.5.Composite reliability (CR) degree where the construct indicator represent the latent construct, values exceeded 0.7 recommended by Hair et al. (2011).Table 2 depicted the results of measurement model.

Discriminant Validity
Discriminant validity of the constructs was evaluated by using Fornell and Larcker (1981) .Discriminate validity is measured by examining the correlation between the measures of the potential overlapping constructs (Fornell & Larcker, 1981).According to , (D. Compeau et al., 1999) the average variance shared between each construct and its measure should be greater than the variance shared between the constructs and other constructs.As seen in Table 3 all, all the diagonal values (square root of AVE) are greater than off-diagonal values (correlations between the construct).Discriminate validity was measured with cross-loading criteria.Cross loading can be done by comparing an indicator's outer loadings on the associated constructs and it should be greater than all of its loading on the other constructs.Table 4 shows that all the loadings are greater than the correspondent cross-loadings.

Structural Model Evaluation
The measurement model result indicates that constructs reliability, indicator reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity of the construct are satisfactory.Thus, the construct can be used for structural model.In order to assess the structural model lateral collinearity test (VIF), values and corresponding t-values were evaluated.

Lateral Collinearity Assessment
According to Kock and Lynn (2012) although vertical collinearity are met, lateral collinearity (predictor-criterion collineraity) may sometimes misled the findings.Thus, Lateral collinearity was assessed with collineraity satatistics VIF.The values of VIF 3.3 or higher, indicate a potential collinearity Diamantopoulos and Siguaw (2006).Table 6 depicted the results of lateral collinearity assessment.Table 6 showed the inner VIF values of the independent variables users intention to adopt internet banking that needs to be examined.The multicollinearity are less than 5 and 3.3, indicating lateral multicollinearity is not a concern in this study (Hair et al., 2014).

Hypotheses Testing
Hypotheses were tested by running a bootstrapping procedure with a resample of 5000, as suggested by Hair et al. (2014).Table 7 shows the PLS estimation results.Structural model results revealed that all four hypotheses have significant relationships with their respective endogenous variables.The relationship between performance expectancy and user's intention to adopt internet banking is supported by H1: (β = 0.497, p< 0.000).Effort expectancy has significant influence on user's intention to adopt internet banking and supported by H2: (β = 0.206, p< 0.000).Next to this, H3 showed that social influence is positively related wit users intention to adopt internet banking (β = 0.075, p< 0.001).Lastly, H4 is supported by (β = 0.255, p< 0.000) which indicated that facilitating condition has positive influence on user's intention to adopt internet banking.

Evaluating Effect Size
The results of the current research show that values for user's intention to adopt internet banking was 0.539 which is acceptable as suggested by Cohen (1988).Researchers also assessed the effect size of .As suggested by Cohen (1988) stated that P value can show the effect exists however, it does not reveal the size of the effect.Thus, the effect size of was assessed.Additionally, predictive relevance of research model was assessed through also known as Stone-Geisser's .Based on the blindfolding procedure, evaluates the predictive validity of a model via PLS.values are greater than 0 showed that the model has predictive relevance for a certain endogenous construct (Cohen, 1988).Table 8 shows the results of and .

Importance performance matrix analysis (IPMA)
IPMA builds on PLS estimates of the structural equation model relationship and includes an additional dimension to the analysis of that latent constructs (Hair et al., 2016).In current research model importance performance matrix analysis was performed using user's intention to adopt internet banking as the target variable.Importance performance matrix map showed that, performance expectancy has the highest importance level to influence user's intentions to adopt internet banking.
On the other side social influence has the highest performance and indicated that it is not important variable to predict user's intention to adopt internet banking.For managers, it is important to focus on performance expectancy and facilitating condition in order to increase user's intention towards adoption of internet banking.The level of importance and performance can be seen in Fig. 3.

Discussion and Conclusion
This study extended the body of knowledge in the area of technology adoption.Previous studies have tried to find internet banking adoption issues with service quality perspective factors and had ignored the technology context in internet banking usage (Rahi, 2015(Rahi, , 2016)).Thus, the present study has tried to examine internet banking issues with unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) in Pakistan.UTAUT model was developed in western culture, therefore testing of UTAUT model in South Asian country is noteworthy.The results have indicated a support of UTAUT findings with Venkatesh et al. (2003).Performance expectancy was significant with user's intention to adopt internet banking suggested that users having more performance expectancy had more inclined towards adoption of internet banking.Interestingly, the effect of sizes revealed that social influence, facilitating condition and effort expectancy had small effect sizes in predicting of user's intention to adopt internet banking.

Theoretical and Managerial Implications
In theoretical perspective, this study has tested UTAUT model in south Asian region and has proved that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating condition are the main factors in order to increase the user's intention to adopt internet banking in Pakistan.The findings of this study suggest that performance expectancy was the most influential factors among all other UTAUT factors (social influence, effort expectancy, and facilitating condition).Additionally, Importance performance matrix analysis (IPMA) also indicated that performance expectancy is the most important variable in predicting of user's intention to adopt internet banking.Thus, managerial action should be taken on the improvement of performance expectancy of the internet banking.Methodologically, this study has used structural equation modelling (SEM), to validate the measurement and structural model.

Limitations and directions for Future Research
Like any other research, this research has some limitations that should be considered before interpreting the findings.The first concern is generalizability of the results, since the present study has used nonprobability sampling approach.Second, this study is cross-sectional and measures the internet banking user's behaviour at one point in time that may be less generalizable as compared with longitudinal study.Future research can extend UTAUT model with other variables such as website design, assurance, reliability and e-customer service in order to get more in-depth knowledge about factors propelling user's intention to adopt internet banking.

Table 1
Demographic Profile of the Respondents

Data Analysis and Results Structural
equation modeling (SEM) is a technique for estimating the causal relationship among variables.There are two types of SEM techniques namely covariance-based technique and variance based techniques.The variance based technique using Partial Least Square (PLS) is appropriate for this study.Smart PLS3.0 software is used to estimate the research model

Table 2
Results of Measurement Model

Table 3
Discriminate validity of Measurement Model Note: Bold values indicate the square root of AVE of each construct

Table 4
Loading and Cross Loadings

Table 6
Results of Lateral Collinearity Assessment

Table 8
Evaluating Effect Size

Table 8
presents the effect size of and it can be seen that H2,H3 and H4 have small effect sizes, whereas H1 has a large effect size on user's intention to adopt internet banking in Pakistan.The values of is greater than 0 (0.394) that signifies research model has good predictive relevance.