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The global financial technology ecosystem continued to grow rapidly during 2018. Because of the rise of open banking thinking, financial business is no longer limited to taking place in traditional financial institutions. The technology, retail, and telecom industries, among others, have joined the financial technology market under the trend for supervision regulation of open banking, which is maturing worldwide. Financial technology was thus promoted into the era of Internet-only bank services (IOBSs), which began in 2019.
IOBSs use various new types of financial technology to create a better experience for users; however, the essence of an IOBS remains the “bank,” and the business content is similar to that of a traditional bank. Therefore, whether IOBSs can change the behavior of customers by providing financial services is a topic worthy of attention. Additionally, regarding the definition of Internet-only banking, financial services are always conducted through the internet and using automated processes; services thus have to be reliable interaction or communication patterns between the service provider and requester (Bhadoria & Chaudhari, 2019). Nevertheless, IOBSs have a higher risk than traditional bank services, because business-related conversation occurs between service providers and clients in financial services and IOBSs rely heavily on the Internet and automated processes. Therefore, understanding how associated risks affect customers’ perceptions of the value of IOBSs is also critical.
Although extant IOBS service operators provide numerous benefits to attract and retain customers, most are still failing to create continuous and organic user-scale growth. The reason may be that superior services have become a basic threshold that is no longer sufficient to motivate customers to make a change; because the benefits of the system are explicit, competitors can easily imitate them. Therefore, the perceived value perspective plays an essential role but can only partially explain the cause of customers’ adoption intention.
In the 2010s, the perceived value perspective was extended to include the perceived risk perspective to enhance the understanding that consumers’ adoption intention has a spectrum, regardless of whether an independent (e.g., Wessels & Drennan, 2010; Wu & Wang, 2005) or dependent (e.g., Featherman, Miyazaki, & Sprott, 2010; Gupta & Kim, 2010; Kim & Gupta, 2009; Mutahar, Daud, Ramayah, Isaac, & Aldholay, 2018) viewpoint is adopted. Perceived risk must be included because IOBSs are provided on the basis of a high degree of cross-domain data exchange and are being developed within mobile applications that can be used at any time and in any place; thus, extensive information communication occurs in the online or digital environment, and the resultant risks strongly influence transactions between supply and demand sides. If customers discover a difference between their actual experience and their expectation during service delivery, they perceive the risk of using the service to be higher, and that risk is dependent on the degree of customers’ subjective uncertainty regarding the outcomes (Alalwan, Dwivedi, Rana, & Algharabat, 2018; Bauer, 1960; Cox, 1967; Kesharwani & Bisht, 2012). Because the perceived risk–value model has been employed in various service domains, such as mobile banking (Featherman et al., 2010; Mutahar et al., 2018) and online commerce (Gupta & Kim, 2010; Kim & Gupta, 2009), it is regarded as the foundation of the IOBS adoption intention model in the present study.