FinTech: The role of Perceived cybersecurity and Organizational trust

Sammanfattning: Context: The advent of the Information and Communication Technologies mostly referred to “digitalization”; offers a new paradigm. Information technology is now perceived as a disruptive innovation capable of shaking up the traditional financial industry. On one side and as a result of the former trend, a new taxonomy emerged under the name of “FinTech” corresponding to the embracement of “digitalization”. FinTech is implicated in the process of disintermediation through innovation. On the other hand and due to the recent incidents at the macroeconomic level such as the 2008 financial crisis or even more recently the Snowden case; the regulatory environment is undergoing drastic changes. Even though the changing regulatory environment firstly acted as a catalyst by promoting the FinTech phenomenon into the spotlight, it inherently touched upon one of the prominent challenges of “FinTech”: to the extent Information Security. Along the line, the FinTech ecosystem which is symbolized by the “Always Available” expression conveys an explicit statement which is yet challenged by the threat of cyberattacks and emphasized by the duality between availability and security. The existing paradox reasserts the growing need for trust from a customer perspective.   Purpose: In this thesis, the authors aimed to investigate the information security and consumer trust challenges within the FinTech ecosystem by empirically testing the customer’s perceptions on the variables that are likely to affect technological adoption   Design/Methodology/approach: A cross sectional quantitative study was conducted with the distribution of a self-completion questionnaire to FinTech customers in Sweden. The designed conceptual model was built on the previous work of Stewart & Jürjens (2018). Stewart and Jürjens (2018) extended the TAM model by considering: Data Security, Customer Trust, Value Added, User Design Interface and FinTech Promotion. In this thesis, the authors adapted Stewart and Jürjens model (2018) by redefining “Data Security” and “Customer Trust”. Three regressions have been performed: one binary logistic regression and two multiple regressions.   Findings: We first ran a principal component analysis in order to reduce dimensionality within our questionnaire. We performed a PCA with an oblique rotation which helped us to produce factor scores. Based on the binary logistic regression, we found out that only Perceived Usefulness and Device security was significantly affecting our respondent’s payment intention. The multiple regression intending to predict the respondent’s intention to use based the on the factor scores from the PCA, revealed that Perceived Usefulness, Usability & ergonomics, Device security and Organizational trust were significant. Lastly, the final regression suggested that Overall trust and security were significantly affecting the respondent’s intention to use. In essence, it appeared that both dimensions are affecting the technological acceptance of users of mobile payment applications.   Research Limitations/implications: There are multiple limitations to our study, the first one being the use of a convenience sampling. Therefore, our results lack of generalizations. Yet, the results of our study confirm what the antecedents of customer’s intention to use mobile payment applications are, to the extent that both security and trust matter.