Assessment of Critical Success Factors of Mobile Banking Innovations at Commercial Bank of Africa and Equity Bank in Kenya

Abstract

Mobile banking is beneficial to both banks and customers. It has potential in reducing the banks’ overheads and transaction- related costs. Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA) and Equity bank have emerged as frontrunners in mobile banking in Kenya - achieving huge growth in mobile customer base, mobile loan portfolio, and mobile savings. However, most of the other commercial banks in Kenya have recorded mixed results. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to assess the critical success factors of mobile banking innovations by evaluating the implementation done in the Commercial Bank of Africa and Equity Bank in Kenya. The study was guided by the following specific objectives; to examine the relative advantage of mobile banking application platform in Kenya, to determine the customer service support for the mobile banking innovations platforms in Kenya, to establish the level of observability of the mobile banking innovation of CBA and Equity commercial banks in Kenya and to investigate the extent personal factors affect other critical success factors on the success of mobile money innovation. Data was collected from a sanple of 99 banking customers selected from Kenya’s number one groceries market called Marikiti market in Nairobi where such informal traders are the main target of such mobile banking innovations. The research design was descriptive cross-sectional research design. Data was collected using selfadministered questionnaires through the drop and pick method. The findings were: only relative advantage had significant effect on performance of a mobile banking innovation (p=0.030) and R2 0.353. However, the all the independent variables has significant correlation with the dependent variable (p<0.01) such that an increase in technological observability was correlated with an increase in performance of mobile banking innovation and a decrease in Customer Service Support level demand had a correlation with increase in mobile banking innovation performance. Therefore the study recommends that banks need not only enhance the relative advantage of each mobile innovation but they should pay attention to their technological observability and any marked demand for customer service for these were indicators of the performance of the mobile bank innovation.