An Empirical Study of Critical Factors of Electronic Banking Adoption for Banking Sector in Palestine

This research paper aims to analyze a questionnaire survey to find out the determinants of adapting e-banking that are absolutely critical for successful implementation in banking sector in Palestine. Out of a possible list of 18 names of banks with more than 200 branches, 1000 bank’s customers were targeted, with 900 usable questionnaires returned, thus giving a response rate of 90 percent. The research led to the development of a criticality e-banking determinants structure, comprising 37 determinants sorted in descending order of criticality through three tiers. The growth of electronic commerce (EC) derived from the advances in information and communication technology (ICT) has significant effects on daily activities of people. The experts involved in this area try to adopt the related technology for facilitating the every-day activities of industry and service organizations that involve the communication with their clients to overcome the limitations of time and place with lowest expenses.


Introduction
The growth of electronic commerce (EC) derived from the advances in information and communication technology (ICT) has significant effects on daily activities of people. The experts involved in this area try to adopt the related technology for facilitating the every-day activities of industry and service organizations that involve the communication with their clients to overcome the limitations of time and place with lowest expenses. As a result of implementing ICT and adopting EC on organizations' and peoples' affairs, the nation's economic growth is positively influenced. Several studies such as Jorgenson (2002), Dedrick et al (2003), Kim (2004), Melville et al (2004), Maitah et al (2014) and Ramayah (2005) reveal that postponing technology implementation and adoption will negatively affects per capita income, work experience and productivity.
In developing countries ICT output gains are mainly obtained through the activities of the ICT sector, rather than using ICT. The development of ICT sector has an important role on employment both in the same sector and in contiguous and supporting industries. The ICT sector long-drawn-out as organizations started to adopt technology to augment automation levels and reduce costs.The emergence and continuous growing of social networking and Web 2.0 firms alongside with the rising status of smart phones and technology smart applications continue to force the development of the industry (Peña-López, 2011).
The banking sector in Palestine is young compared to many developing countries. Banking sector in Palestine is managed by Palestinian Monetary Authority (PMA) as it is the promising Central Bank of Palestine. The formation of PMA was in 1994 by presidential decree as an independent institution and later by an act of the Palestine Legislative Council PMA Law Number (2) of 1997 which outlined the full authority and autonomy of the PMA (PMA, 2014), where it was established to ensure the stability and effectiveness of the Palestinian financial system (PMA, 2014). According to PMA (2014), there are 18 commercial banks operating in the country, with a network of more than two hundred branches and delegate offices. There are eight local banks that include two Islamic banks and ten foreign banks that encompass of eight Jordanian banks, one Egyptian bank and one branch for the HSBC. Two of the banks in service in Palestine are Islamic and the residual are commercial non-Islamic banks.
The increasingly evolving of competition between banks, more informed customers, rapidly changing technologies and increasingly innovation driven work environment, in addition to the fact that the business environment is increasingly characterized by instability and uncertainty triggers the banking needs for continuous performance enhancement in an innovative way, as a necessity issue. So for the bank to be competitive, it must adopt flexibility into its operations, and to increase its performance it must adopt the new trends of ICT such as e-banking services. The adoption of e-banking programs must be involved within different functions of banking activities and oriented toward exceeding the customers' and stakeholders' requirements.

Problem Statement
Palestine's ICT sector has grown in the last two decades, enabled by the availability of related infrastructure such as computers, broadband, software, maintenance and widely internet access. This infrastructure is necessary for preparing e-banking sector as a driver for building a high tech competitive banking market. Building a Palestinian competitive high tech banking sector is necessary to enable these banks to market their services regionally and internationally. But the problem here is that Palestinian banking sector is not at the level of quality in terms of e-banking services needed to compete other banks in the region, making these banks in Palestine lack the appropriate competitive advantage (White et al., 2012). Our study emerged from this point of view, where we need to highlight the factors influencing the adopting e-banking services at banking sector in Palestine. Effective adopting of e-banking practices will raise the quality level of banking sector in Palestine and enabling this sector to compete regionally.

Importance of the Problem
As consequences of the vital role e-banking programs are playing in banking performance enhancement, banks have to adopt the best e-banking practices. This study aims to investigate the factors that influence users' acceptance of e-banking in Palestine, by analyzing educated customers from the Palestinian population, where we contribute to e-banking adoption by providing empirical data investigating on e-banking factors that work in banking sector in Palestine from the customers view point.

Literature Review
Various theories have emerged to clarify a superior understanding of the factors that drive the adoption of information systems (IS) such as e-banking adoption (Taylor and Todd, 1995). One of these important theories is intention-based theories, which developed factors of users' behavioral intentions for IS adoption. The mainly recognized theoretical models that explain the relationship between user beliefs, attitudes, and intentions are Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA -Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975), Technology Acceptance Model (TAM - Davis, 1989) and Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB -Ajzen, 1991). TAM proposes that there is a relation between the attitudes of users towards IS adopting and the two main determinants of the attitudes which are perceived usefulness or perceived relative enhancement in users' job performance, and perceived ease of use, where TAM was intended to forecast information technology acceptance and use on the occupation (Davis, 1989;Al-Gahtani and King,1999). TPB is more dominated toward the perceived behavioral control, in other words focused on the perceived ease or difficulty of performing the behavior. TAM and TPB were stemmed from TRA, which states that beliefs influence attitudes and lead to intentions and as a result generate behaviors. TRA stats that attitude towards performing behavior and subjective norms as social pressures to carry out behavior are considered as the main influencers of behavior. Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) that explains as much as 70% of the variance in intention provides an inclusive assessment of eight well-known models (Venkatesh et al. 2003). These eight models areTRA,TAM, Motivational Model (MM - Davis et al.1992), TPB which is a mixture model combining factors from TAM and TPB (C-TAM-TPB - Taylor and Todd, 1995), Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT -Moore and Benbasat, 1996), Social Cognitive Theory (SCT -Compeau and Higgins, 1995), and Model of PC Utilization (MPCU -Thompson et al. 1991). The UTAUT model proposes that four constructs proceed as determinants of behavioral intentions and use behavior: (i) performance anticipation, (ii) effort anticipation, (iii) social influence, and (iv) facilitating conditions. In addition, UTAUT also posits the role of four key moderator variables: gender, age, experience, and voluntariness of use. As we see UTAUT completes the principles of TAM with two more factors (in addition to perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness): social influence and facilitating conditions. Previous studies also declare the effects of four constructs of UTAUT on users' behavioral intention (Carlsson et al., 2006;Maitah et al., 2015;Mansaray et al., 2015;Park et al., 2007).

Perceived Ease of use
According to Davis et al. (1989), ease of use is the extent to which a user willing to use the system with no effort. It reveals user perception of the degree of difficulty to use e-banking. According to UTAUT, effort expectancy www.ccsenet.org/mas Modern Applied Science Vol. 9, No. 9;2015 80 positively affects performance expectancy (Venkatesh et al., 2003), where as users experience that e-banking is effortless to use, where they will have good willing to acquire the expected performance.
Otherwise, their performance expectancy will be low. Perceived usefulness and ease of use that underpins the adoption of a technology determines the likely long-term use of a technology, as well (Guriting and Ndubisi, 2006;Ignatius and Ramayah, 2005;Ramayah, 2005Ramayah, , 2006aRamayah, ,b, 2004Ramayah et al., 2005).The impact ofease of use on behavioral intention is affected by attitude toward behavior (TaylorandTodd,1995), in addition, users of technology intend to minimize their behavioral effort(Venkatesh2000). An intrinsic motivation affects the user-friendliness of a service positively toward consumers 'intentionsto use an electronic service even without a positive attitude toward the service itself, where intrinsic motivation refers to the pleasure of doing an activity (Venkatesh, 2000). Wessels and Drennan (2010) consider adopting e-banking system for ease of use vitally important for affecting the attitude. Perceived usefulness affects the external factors that exercise influences ahead the perceived ease of use (Brown, 2002). Banks should consider the negative effects of difficult usage of e-banking interfaces to develop a user friendly e-banking system (Zhou et al., 2010).

Social Influence
It is defined as to what extend an individual perceives the perspective of others believe as an important issue to use the new system (Venkatesh et al., 2003). Objects of social influence encounter the effect of people important to the behavior of user on the adoption of e-banking. Traditional banks can benefit from the experience of earlier adopters of e-banking, whose insights and opinions may generate positive word-of-mouth influences on successive adoption behavior (Wiedemann et al., 2008). Publication of such certificates and get a superstar agreement will help to promote user adoption.

Facilitating Conditions
Facilitating conditions reflect the effect of a user's knowledge and ability (Venkatesh et al., 2003). E-banking requires users to possess confident skills such as using electronic services.In addition, users need to bear usage costs such as data service and transaction fees when using e-banking. Users have to possess necessary financial resources such as transaction fees and operational skills, to be able to adopt e-banking.

Perceived Cost of Use
The price of achieving and using technologyis one instrument that has been used as an argument for the adaption ofe-banking to various users, where it is considered as a barrier of adopting new technologies (Hung et al., 2003;Kleijnen et al., 2004;Wu and Wang, 2005;Dahlberg et al., 2008;). On the other hand, low costs of using e-banking services can persuade customers to use e-banking .A number of world-class organizations do employ technology-costing measures as an indication of e-banking usage intention, as , the higher is the costs of using a new technology (i.e. e-banking), the less will be its use. (Hong et al., 2008;Kuo & Yen, 2009;Wessels and Drennan, 2010).

Credibility
Credibility is the starting point for entering the trust ability of a system and its ability in applying transactions, where the extent to which an individual who uses e-banking services believes on having no privacy or security threats determines the level of creditability (Wang et al. ,2003;Erdem and Swait, 2004); the ongoing journey towards e-banking adoption must deliver the appropriate credibility on the ingredient of financial service provider to reveal the fear of users of transferring their money and personal information to a third party (Luarn and Lin, 2005). Many banks consider credibility as an important step in the implementation process of e-banking adoption, lowering the risk associated with it and increasing the willingness of people to use it. (Luarn and Lin, 2005;Wang et al., 2006;Koenig-Lewis et al., 2010).

Perceived Risk
perceived risk is related to the context of physical, financial, , psychological, or social risks involved in online transactions (Forsythe & Shi, 2003;Im et al., 2008). The emphasis on perceived risk is an important determinant of e-banking adoption (Laforet and Li., 2005;Yang, 2009;Ndubisi and Sinti, 2006;Tan et al., 2009;Hanafizadeh et al.;. The highest percentages of the adoption of technology-enabled service scores relate to customer attitude and satisfaction occur when the risk of using it is low (Lovelock et al., 2001;Wu and Wang, 2005;Wessels and Drennan, 2010). Customer perceived self-efficacy as a core component of perceived risk should play a central role in the sustainability of a new technology (Ellen et al., 1991;Agarwal and Karahanna, 2000).

Personal Interaction
To achieve individual interaction, there is a need to emphasize the importance of managing personal contact www.ccsenet.org/mas Modern Applied Science Vol. 9, No. 9;2015 81 during the usage of personal services as the first step to understand the process of e-banking adoption (Dabholkar, 1992(Dabholkar, , 1996Al Hinai, 2009).

Quality of the Internet Connection
An important effective driver for any Internet-based application is the quality of the Internet connection (i.e. speed and continuity). The Internet was introduced in Palestine …. and is controlled by the . Palestine Telecommunications Company (Paltel) works in many communication fields such as fixed telephones, leased lines, and VPNs.Paltel provides Internet services with high speeds by using leased lines and fiber optics technology (Annual Report, 2012, Paltel). Broadband solutions are offered by several companies in Palestine such as ADSL, Voice over IP (VOIP), Internet via microwave and others. (Ministry of Telecom & Information Technology, 2011). According to , Internet access is one of the determinants that affect the adoption of online banking, where the lack of an appropriate Internet connection makes the use of online banking not achievable. There is a noteworthy relationship between the speed of Internet access and the employ of online banking services (Almogbil's, 2005).

Resistance to Change
Customers' resistance to change from traditional ways of doing banking activities to online banking has been highlighted in different studies Inquiry, 1997). Customers may not be willing to change their recent traditions of doing operations, unless they feel to fulfill their needs, as customers do not have the intention with high level of sluggishness to transfer their traditional banking activities to electronic ones (Daniel, 1999;Nov and Ye, 2008;Laukkanen et al. 2009;.

Trust
Trust can be defined as the company's confidence in the sincerity of its business partner and involvement of the factors related to this perception (Ganesan, 1994;Geyskens et al., 1998;Das and Teng, 2001). One of the important factors of e-commerce development is Consumers' trust in their electronic transactions (Yousafzaietal.,2003). Avoiding perceived riskleads to trust where these factors are considered as keybarriers toadopting online services (Featherman and Pavlou, 2003;Gefenet al., 2003;Lee and Turban, 2001;Jiang et al., 2013;Liu et al., 2008, Jain et al., 2013. As onlinebanking transactions contain sensitiveinformation and involve access to critical files through the Internetwithin the financialtransactions, trust is more important in online banking than offline one (Alsajjan and Dennis, 2006;Luo et al., 2010;Suh and Han, 2002).Customers' trust need to be accumulated by the long term, and there is a need to be aware ofthe perceived risks bythe customersas a way to identify the obstacles facing theadoption of e-banking to be able to overcome them. For the bankto augment customers trust, the bank have to protect their customers' privacy and personal information, in other words the bank has to adopt the needed processes to be able to detect fraud and information theft so as to avoid them, and secure transactions.
In what follows, Section 2 discusses the method of the study. In section 3, we illustrate the study results. In section 4, we discuss the research findings. Section 5concludes our research.

The Study
According to the literature review we find out factors and according to them we constructed the questionnaire as it is seen in Table No (1999), Hung et al. (2003), Venkatesh et al. (2003), and Wu and Wang (2005), Davis(1989), Venkatesh and Davis (2000), Tan and Teo (2000), Wangetal (2003)  A1 Using e-banking services is a good idea. Taylor and Todd (1995), Teo and Pok (2003), and Hung et al. (2003) A2 Using e-banking value-added services to help in performing financial activities information is a good idea. A3 Being not satisfied with using traditional banking services when performing financial activities. A4 Encouraging the use of e-banking among social group. Behavioral intention (BI) BI1 I plan to use e-banking services in the future.

Participant Characteristics, Response Rate and Customers Breakdown
Having the total banks in Palestine targeted (land area is 6,170 , 130 km long and 40-65 km in width), it was decided right from the beginning to cover customers of all banks in Palestine to gain 100 % response rate. A total of 900 proper questionnaires were received correctly, achieving the 90 % response rate that was fixed at the outset. The 1000 customers aimed in this research represent the customers for all banks in Palestine. The breakdown of these banks represents a heterogeneous mixture, where 44.4 % are Palestinian, 44.4 % Jordanian and 11.1 percent foreigners. The demographic issues were specified in terms of customers' age, gender, education and income.

Measures and Covariates
Three-point ordinal scale was used in the study survey as a level of measurement with three classifications critical, important, and minor. Numbers of 1, 2, and 3 respectively were assigned for the three levels of importance critical, important and minor categories. The data which imply frequency distribution allow the patterns of the responses to be examined and descried. (Weisberg, 1992). In our investigation study we used frequency distribution as an appropriate measure for the data organization where it allows the summarization of the responses distribution for a variable by calculating the typical value which is the point of central tendency, and in this way we can measure the spread of this typical value (Carlson and Thorne, 1997). This method of investigation is we need realize the proper recognition of compromise mathematical comparison of e-banking www.ccsenet.org/mas Modern Applied Science Vol. 9, No. 9;2015 84 adoption variables. For the three-point scale which is used in this research, there are only 3 possible levels of value. When respondents devote an e-banking factor the same grade (1, 2, 3) then we will get a zero value of the range, as the maximum and minimum scores will be the same. Discrepancy ratio is the percentage of responses that do not drop into the modal category. It is a fitting measure of spread for the ordinal data that we have in this study. Variation ratio (VR) is calculated as follows: VR =1 -Frequency distribution of the mode.
Variation ratio has to be calculated to demonstrate the degree of agreement on objective foundation in specifying an e-banking factor as critical. A value of zero will mean agreement for e-banking adoption factor as critical. Values of 0.5 or less mean bulk agreement, values of more than 0.5 point to no majority agreement in scoring an e-banking factor as critical. Although, the variation ratio doesn't consider a complete circulation of responses. The index of variety is declared as a distribution measure depending on a percentage of responses in each group (Weisberg, 1992). Index of distribution is illustrated mathematically as: Index of distribution = 1 -( + +…+ ).
Where = the proportion of responses in category k and k is the number of categories.
This distribution index declares the focus degree of responses in a few large groups as squaring magnitude that highlight the large proportion, more than small values (Weisberg, 1992). Therefore in this perspective, the index of diversity can be proposed as a substitute measure of conformity between respondents taking into account the response distribution of each of the e-banking adoption factors. A low index value illustrates common conformity on the importance of an e-banking factor.

Statistics and Data Analysis
This research shows that the response distributions of the e-banking adoption factors include only two possible kinds of ranges, which are one and two. These results are shown in Table 2, which summarizes the groups of the e-banking adoption factors by the variety values. It is obvious from this grouping of the e-banking factors that banks customers practically recognize the significance of the e-banking adoption factors with various modes. This finding is compatible with the literature, which shows that the level of prominence on most of e-banking adoption determinants practically varies specially in developing countries. As shown in Tables 1 and 2, an objective evaluation of the proposition of the retort model is illustrated. The e-banking adoption factors with a range value of one were revealed as critical showing that these 14 e-banking factors force the successful implementation of e-banking practices. The residual 30 e-banking factors with two range value, illustrate that some respondents returned these factors as of small significance. From these e-banking factors, the bulk agreement returned three factors (CR2, RC1 and BI3) as important and four e-banking factors (SOI3, PRR1, PRR2 and PRR3) as of slight significance. For that it will be normal not to analyze these seven e-banking factors and to deal with them as unimportant e-banking factors in the implementation of e-banking practices in the banking sector in Palestine. This complies with the literature review. This places of interest for the need for adopting the e-banking adoption factors in requisites of their significance.

Ancillary Analyses and Participant Flow
All of the e-banking adoption factors response distributions are unimodal leading to the suitable prove of the use of mode as the compute of innermost trend for this level of examination. Unimodal declares that the majority commonly occurring responses come into view on one group, shown as a single peak in the bar charts which represent the response distribution of each of the 44 e-banking adoption factors. A sum of 40 e-banking factors was stacked on critical and important groups, while four e-banking factors were returned as of minor importance by the enormous bulk of the respondents. These factors are related to performance risk e-banking initiatives. In addition from the social point of view bank customers in Palestinian context are affected by the others in their attitude of using new technology, where social influences are highly apparent in Palestinian society as for developing countries. Therefore, these three kinds of groups are recognized (critical, important and minor significance). These modal groups are shown in Table 1.   1  14  PU1, PU2, PU3, PU4, PEOU1, PEOU2, PC3, SR1, SR2,SR3,SR4, PR1, PR2, CR4  Critical  2  30  PC1, PC2, SOI1, SOI2, SOI3, FAC1, FAC2, QI1, QI2, QI3, PRR1, PRR2, PRR3,  CR1, CR2, CR3, TR1, TR2, TR3, RC1, RC2, RC3, PI1, A1, A2, A3, A4, BI1, BI2,  BI3 Critical, important, minor importance

Variation Ratio and the Variation Index
Using this helps for separating the e-banking adoption determinants with bulk agreement from other e-banking determinants with no bulk agreement as apparent by some customers as of no result to the success or failure of the execution practices of e-banking adoption. The variety index illustrates the level of focus of customers in a few large groups. Table 3 declares the calculated variation ratio and the variety index for the 37 e-banking determinants which are returned by customers as critical. Table 3 declares that the variety index values hold up the degree of conformity recognized by the variation ratio. This is obvious since the value of the variety index did not accomplish the maximum value of 66.7%. This illustrates concurrence among the customers' respondents regarding the criticality of these e-banking factors. On the other hand, the variation ratio values recognized 37 e-banking factors to encompass bulk agreement, as those factors have variation ratio value of 0.5 or a smaller amount, and the quality factors with two level of no bulk agreement, that have variation ratio values more than 0.5. As a result, embody the basics to construct the confirmed constitution of the critical e-banking adoption factors.

Conformity of the Recognized Critical E-Banking Adoption Factors
By using the variation ratio and the variety, an objective finding in the procedure of ordering and conforming the critical e-banking adoption factors is supplemented, precisely as the mode declared in the identification of these e-banking adoption factors.
Conformation of the e-banking factor, consequently, declares the recognized e-banking factors, considering their effect level in the successful execution of e-banking adoption implementing prioritization procedure of these e-banking adoption factors with respect to their apparent criticality. Table 4 shows the e-banking adoption factors ranked in a descending order of their variation ratio and the range of these factors. These factors are of two folds from bank customers point of view, that is one fold for factors of positive influence and other fold of negative influence for e-banking adoption. Some of these factors positively affect e-banking adoption such as perceived usefulness, so as to augment them, others negatively affect the e-banking adoption such as security risk, so as to realize the vision of the bank customers that they can be overcome. In what follows, we illustrate the criterion to be used in the conformation procedure.

Conclusion
The analysis of the results shows that about 27 out of 37 of the findings reveals that about 27 out of 37 critical e-banking adoption factors proved in this research share most of the values covered by the main principles espoused by related previous studies, as follows: • Perceived usefulness as the bank customers are attracted and motivated to adopt e-banking services to handle their banking transactions, when they feel that these services are beneficial for them such as improving their payment efficiency, encompassing a number of useful products and services under its ambit which include ATM, debit/credit cards, phone/mobile banking and PC/Internet banking etc and e-banking compatible to modern lifestyle.
• Designing and developing the e-banking products, tools and web systems to be easy to use, so as the interaction with e-banking site is clear and understandable.
• Overcoming the security risk issues which are exposed to bank customers perception, so as fearing feelings of not feeling safe in performing transactions over the e-banking, being exposed to fraud or monetary loss in using e-banking services, not perceiving the information relating to user and e-banking transactions as secure and not feeling totally safe given that personal privacy information over the e-banking are resolved.
• Overcoming the performance risk issues to resolve the bank customers fearing feelings for a possibility of outflow of personal information or username and passwords information, when using e-banking services.
• Assuring the creditability of e-banking services, so as no money will be lost in unauthorized electronic fund transfers.
• Producing E-banking services as free of cost. There is a need for banks to develop systems for quantifying the main factors that influence the method the bank adds value using e-banking services to customers. In addition develop a system using tools such as dash boards for measuring key indicators of the level of perceived security and performance risk that encounter e-banking system.