CURRENT CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES OF M-BANKING IN AFGHANISTAN

Abstract

Mobile banking (m-banking) is the newest technological innovations in the banking industry that simplifies the accessibility of banking services to customers. M-banking has emerged as an alternative to e-banking and therefore widely has been adopted by developed and developing countries. Afghanistan was one of those countries that started to launch m-banking service in 2009 to improve its banking services. Yet, despite efforts and investment made for the diffusion of this technology, the adoption rate is still very low. For this reason, this research is conducted to investigate the major challenges and opportunities of m-banking in Afghanistan as a first objective of this research and providing beneficial recommendations for futures assessments as a second objective of this study. A qualitative research method is used to find out the major challenges and opportunities of this technology by collecting data from primary and secondary data sources. Therefore, in-depth interviews conducted both in supply-side and demand-side, with bank officials and customers. Interviews with bank officials focus on four pre-designed patterns (economy, technology infrastructure, regulation, and policies, and organization). The result then revealed the major challenges were in economic and technology infrastructure, and organization parts, respectively. While the result also exposed that customers have main concerns with security, internet quality, risks/fraud, trust, awareness, and interface design of these services.