Online Banking Industry Essay

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

For the past decade the banking sector of Ghana has seen revolutionary activities including influx of foreign banks into the country, increase in bank capitalization, re-categorization of banks into universal banking and the rest. These have heightened competition in the banking industry in Ghana. There have been the need for more sophisticated and advanced means of operating in order to be more effective and efficient in banks operations for their continuous survival. Thus, to widen and maintain market share in the Ghanaian banking industry in these periods of high competition, banks are require to be operating with the top notch level of technology which includes electronic banking and internet banking.

Electronic

According to Furst et al. (2000) some of the reason for the increase in this aspect of banking are the notion that electronic banking and payments will grow rapidly, more or less in tandem with proliferating electronic commerce; industry projections that Internet banking will cut banks’ costs, increase banks’ revenue growth, and make banking more convenient for customers; and some vexing public policy issues. Chaven (2013) adds that internet offers customers faster access, more convenient and around the clock access to banking irrespective of the customer’s location and time. Salawu et al. (2007) adds that internet offers faster delivery of information from the customer and service provider, this adding to the importance of internet banking. Internet banking has therefore become an important channel to sell banks products and services according to Christopher et al. (2006) and Singhal and Padhmanabhan, (2008). This has affected marketing practices of banks in most countries, resulting in high performance in the banking

It is highly expected that these products are supposed to improve the performance of banks. However, DeYoung et al. (2007) assert that lots of researchers have produced little evidence regarding these potential changes even though there exist good reasons to expect that the widespread availability of internet banking will affect the mixture of financial services produced by banks, the manner in which banks produce those services, and the resulting financial performances of those