Consumer Adoption of Open Banking Products and Services

Abstract

Open banking is an evolution driven by new regulations, advance in technology, competition, and change in customer expectations. Open banking is about enabling consumers to share their financial data with authorized third parties in return for more personalized products and services. However, the adoption of open banking products and services is still very limited. Consumers are also not familiar with the open banking environment and are not well informed about the new regulations such as PSD2.
Previous studies have shown that the success of open banking depends on: the safe transfer of the financial data and on the control consumers have over their data. Moreover, literature around the disclosing of financial data has demonstrated that consumers are unwilling to share their data, with privacy concerns being the dominant factor. Further, the new data economy brings a lot of around who actually owns the data and what data ownership leads to.
To explore the adoption of open banking among consumers, this study combined the technology acceptance model with external factors related to consumer personality attributes. Through intensive literature review, three dimensions are identified as crucial: psychological ownership, user’s privacy concerns, and technology readiness. A conceptual framework was developed along with nine hypotheses. The data was collected via an online survey. The reliability and validity of all the constructs were assessed. The hypotheses were tested through structural equation modeling using the SmartPLS software.
The results of the analysis indicated that the conceptual model was a good fit. The analysis indicated that there is a strong and significant effect on the intention to use open banking products and services. Specifically, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use were important predictors for intention to use. Although psychological ownership had a negative effect on the intention to use, it showed a significant total effect through the mediating effects of perceived usefulness and ease of use. While the results of privacy concerns were insignificant, the technology readiness construct registered a total positive effect through the mediating role of the technology acceptance model on the intention to use. These findings allow the understanding of what affects the consumer’s intention to use open banking products.
The study supports the literature by being the first study to include the construct of psychological ownership to the technology acceptance model. Although the results are quite encouraging, the generalization should not be based on one single study. Future studies could use these findings to explore more the effect of psychological ownership on the disclosing of personal and financial data. Furthermore, by being a pioneer in the topic of open banking, the study provides banks and financial organizations with new insights on the consumers’ adoption of open banking products and services.