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Top1. Introduction
The rapid growth of the Internet has radically changed the delivery channels used by the financial services industry. It has become the self-service delivery channel that allows banks to provide information and offer services to their customers with more convenience via the web services technology (Safeena, 2010). Electronic service is becoming a viable option for interaction between financial service providers and their customers (Rotchanakitumnuai & Speece, 2004). For banks Internet banking offers great opportunities for banks to increase their transactions, extend their customer bases, and to decrease their operational and opportunity costs (Ozdmir et al., 2007). From the consumers’ perspective Internet banking is extremely beneficial to customers because of the savings in costs, time and space it offers, its quick response to complaints, and its delivery of improved services, all of which benefits make for easier banking (Turban et al., 2000). The financial services offered by internet banking could include viewing all transactions and all accounts balances in real time, payment of bills, change of money in other currencies, transfers of money, stocks operations, purchase of all kind of insurances purchase of travel tickets and travel packages, etc.. (Gerrard & Cunningham, 2003; Polatoglu & Ekin, 2001).
Today, commercial banks in Tunisia are competing aggressively to introduce new types of technological products and services to improve their operations and to reduce costs. Credit cards, automatic teller machines (ATMs), telephone and Internet banking are among some of the technology innovations that have been offered by banks to overcome the drawbacks of changing market conditions.
Despite all their efforts these systems especially Internet banking remained largely unnoticed by the customers. Some banking institutions limit their Internet Banking services to an informational website. Others are using their web sites not only to provide the basic operations such as fund transfer or account details, but also to provide new services such as securities trading, bill payments, check book requests, credit card requests and investment advice. The number of Internet Banking users is still very weak in comparison with the others electronic banking services and they are not frequently used by Tunisian consumers (Wadie, 2011; Wadie & Lanouar, 2012). Therefore, customer perception has become very essential to become successful in providing Internet banking service.
According to the statistics for the month of December 2011 on the Internet in Tunisia (Tunisia Internet Agency), the number of users is 4,200,000 versus 3,500,000 users in 2009, the number of email accounts 737,275 and the number of websites 12,454. This issue is an important opportunity for the banking industry to formulate their marketing strategies to promote new forms of Internet banking services in the future. By understanding the factors influencing intentions to use Internet banking, Tunisian banks can develop strategies for Internet banking implementation in ways that will improve the performance their. Knowledge of these factors, how they can be measured, and how they relate to each other, is crucial in the development, implementation, and management of successful systems (Gallion, 2000).
Individual acceptance and usage of new technologies has been studied extensively over the past two decades, especially the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), by proposed by Davis, et al. (1989). This model now provides a stable and secure way for predicting user acceptance of a wide range of new technologies (Arteaga & Duarte, 2010). Since TAM has been used in many studies to predict and understand user perceptions of system use and the probability of adopting an Internet system (Gefen et al., 2003; Hsu et al., 2006; Wu & Chen, 2005), they are the most appropriate tools for understanding Internet banking adoption.