Examining the adoption of mobile banking: Empirical evidence from Indonesian Muslim students

This study investigates the impact of political instability, macroeconomic and bank-specific factors on the profitability of Islamic banks in the context of Yemen. The study used two common measures of profitability, namely, Return on Assets (ROA) and Return on Equity (ROE) as dependent variables. Seven key independent (internal and external) variables are also used. There are five fully-fledged Islamic banks (IBs) working in Yemen. The study selected only three out of five IBs due to the availability of data for the period ranging from 2010 to 2014. The descriptive and multiple regression analyses were done. The results of the study indicate that operating efficiency and financial risk have negative and significant relationships with ROA and ROE. The findings also show that capital adequacy has a negative and insignificant relationship with ROA and ROE. Furthermore, the study reveals that assets size (LogA), assets management, liquidity and deposits have a significant and positive impact on banks’ profitability. GDP, Inflation rate (IR) and Political instability have positive and significant impact on Yemeni banks’ profitability. Based on the best knowledge of the authors, this study is considered one of the first and pioneering studies that determine the factors affecting the profitability of Islamic banks of Yemen. Therefore, the study gives good insights for the policy makers, regulators and interested parties for enhancing the profitability of Islamic banks in Yemen.

The purpose of the present study is to test how do the four important psychological antecedents, namely need for achievement (nAch), propensity to risk (PtR), self-confidence (SeC), internal locus of control (IlC) are mediated by the entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) to predict the entrepreneurial intention (EI) in a traditionally oil-based Saudi economy striving for economic diversification. Hypotheses are tested by applying the partial least square (PLS) structural equation modeling (SEM) to a sample of 282 undergraduate business students (male and female) collected from a public university of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The results suggest that psychological variables and self-efficacy play a fundamental role in enhancing entrepreneurial intention (EI) of Saudi students. Personality-related variables have direct influence over EI in other context, but in Saudi context, psychological variables are necessary but not sufficient to develop entrepreneurial intention unless combined with self-efficacy. Self-efficacy has a strong mediating effect between psychological variables and entrepreneurial intentions in Saudi context.

As the number of smart phone users and the popularity of Internet among people are growing day by day in Bangladesh, it became necessary for Bangladeshi local banks to provide mobile banking services to their customers. Therefore, this study seeks to identify the crucial and determining factors that may affect the intention of customers to use mobile banking services. The sample size in this study is 91, in which majority are the students of Business Studies. All respondents have mobile banking at the time of the survey. The samples in the study were mainly drawn from the private university students (i.e. Business Administration students) and faculty members, and some bank officers participated as sample respondents in this study. A non-probability random sampling method is applied, and a 5% significance level is used to accept the hypotheses. Cronbach alpha (α) of 0.7 and above is considered to measure the reliability of the item wise variables. This study examines six variables (perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, trust, security, perceived privacy, and technology competency) to analyze their impact on the behavioral intention of banking customers to use mobile banking services. Three variables, namely perceived usefulness, security, and technology competency, are found to be significant predictors of customers’ intent to use mobile banking in Bangladesh. For analytical purposes, SPSS version 23.0 is used to test hypotheses. The paper also provides significant implications for bank managers to increase the adoption of mobile banking for their sustainability.