Enhancing trust online A cross Bsectional study on users judgments of online bank websites in Germany

Abstract: Background: One the latest developments in the banking sector are online banks, which provide their services only online while physical offices are not available. Market research conducted in Germany, have shown that Germans are hesitating to adopt to the digital offered banking services. The major barrier for adoption is due to trust issues, which are rooted in perceived security and privacy protections. Earlier literature has found that other website interaction factors are also playing a role in order to enhance the trustworthiness of a website. Trust is a necessity in every economic and social relationship, since all relationships involve a possibility that one of the actors behaves opportunistically, and takes advantage of the other actor. The chance of opportunistic behavior contributes to the level of judged risk in the specific relationship, and together with trust ultimately affects the adoption of online banks. In order for users to become consumers of an online bank, they need to judge the online bank website as trustworthy. These judgments can be done either intuitively or throughout reasoning, considering information. The marketing field is emphasizing that intuitive judgments are essential in order to attract new consumer. However, the psychology field is stressing that even though most individuals tend to rely on intuitive judgments, these can be wrong since they can be based on heuristics and include biases. Purpose: In order to understand the formation of judgments by users of an online bank website, the purpose of our thesis is twofold. First, to measure the relationships between the website interaction factors and the concepts trust and risk. Second, with a lower degree of ambition, the purpose is to measure the relationship between intuitive and reasoned trust judgments. Methodology: The study was conducted through a quantitative research method. A six-point scale questionnaire was used in order to examine the relationships between trust, risk and the website interaction factors. A web-based questionnaire was sent out to German web users, where in total 122 respondents responded. The sample was equally split into online bank consumers and non-consumers. The statistical analysis of the data revealed results enabling to fulfill the purpose. Results: The findings of our thesis demonstrate that online bank consumers and non-consumers do not significantly differ in their judgments regarding the websites. The perceptions of the information quality, security and privacy protection are found as the most influential website interaction factors towards the trust judgments. Privacy and security protection are mostly influence website users in their risk judgment. Our study further reveals that online bank website users make their trust judgments through the first impression while further considerations of the websites' content enhance their trust judgments.