Who will you trust to do your banking, in an era of Fintech fever?

Abstract

Disruptive technology is exponentially taking more place in our everyday lives and opens a tremendous number of opportunities. The FinTech industry is by far dispensed from this. The technological development combined with the arrival of new regulations has led to a new shift in the financial market. Certain aspect of B2C banking which traditionally was reserved banks, has now become a service that any firm can enter, with the restrains of certain aspects. In a context where perceived risk is increasing, and the amount of financial service providers are growing, we are curious to study role of brand trust and trust in the adoption of a new Fintech service and the capability to transfer trust from a brand to a service. The study is characterized by a deductive approach. Firstly, we state pertinent secondary data that serves as our basis for the elaboration of our hypotheses. To test the hypotheses, we first conducted a pre-study to map levels of trust in various companies. For the main study we gathered three different groups, with 150 respondents in each. Every group where to test the same FinTech service but delivered by three different brands. After the experiment we asked the respondents questions concerning, trust, perceived risk and other identified antecedents. The main findings suggest that the importance of a brand towards trust in a FinTech service is limited. Ability seems to be the least transferable trusting dimension from a brand. Meanwhile, Integrity appears to have the most transferable characteristics. Adverse from brand trust, we discover the crucial role of initial trust in a FinTech service towards adoption. Adverse to our results of transferability, we discover that cognitive trust appears to be the primary dimensions towards adoption, while affective trust are secondary dimensions. Meanwhile, we discover that all the trusting dimensions are interrelated. Lastly the analysis reveals the crucial barrier of perceived Privacy risk towards adoption.