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Volume 9 Issue 2 November 2006
Quantitative Evaluation of e-Banking Web Sites: an empirical study of Spanish Banks
Francisco Javier Miranda, Rosa Cortés and Cristina Barriuso
University of Extremadura, Badajoz, Spain
fmiranda@unex.es
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Internet banking in European Union has evolved very fast, either in number of on-line banks or services offered through the web. The concern about the quality of this electronic banking environment raises the question of how to evaluate these on-line services. Online banking research to date is to a large extent anecdotal. Only a very limited number of studies have explored Electronic Banking in recent years.
In this work an objective investigation of the issue has been conducted by manually accessing and evaluating the web sites of Spanish private and saving banks. All Spanish banks and saving banks web sites (a total of 98 sites) were visited and assessed between April and May, 2004.
Quality of web home pages was determined using an original Web Assessment Index. The main challenge in the elaboration of the index was to avoid subjective factors, which have been predominant in previous assessment tools. Our index is based on four broad categories: site content, speed, accessibility and navigability which are quantified in an objective and logical way.
The results of the application of this index to the analysis of Spanish banks sites have demonstrated the high flexibility of the WAI and have detected the main weaknesses of the web pages assessed. We noticed that Spanish banks and saving banks sites are only at the beginning in terms of functionality. Besides, significant differences between private banks and saving banks have been highlighted.
A detailed report of the results arising from this investigation is presented and systematically analyzed. These findings will be useful for both researchers and practitioners who seek to understand the issues relevant to electronic banking. The strength of this study lies in its foundation for future research: having identified the critical categories and factors in the WAI, the next stage is to test this tool in different countries and measure the relationship between the index value and online banking success. Further research in this important area is currently under way.
Keywords:
World Wide Web, Electronic Banking, Content analysis, Web design, Internet, Research paper
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