A Study on the Consumers' Satisfaction of FinTech Solutions Provided by an Indian Major Bank during COVID Times

Abstract

Pandemic situations posed by COVID-19 create a great challenge to the banking sector in India, and it leads to increase online and mobile banking which is now a necessity for the users of banking services. Advancement of innovation gives an alternative approach to the consumer within the service sector – technological innovation gives a broad landscape of consumer-oriented FinTech models for banking sector and the banking industry is the early adopter of the latest technological innovation. Development of mobile and Internet banking over tangible banking system empowers consumers and decreases the significance of tangible banking system including physical work force. Rationale behind the study: After reviewing most of the available research papers, it has been observed that the impact of online service quality on consumer’s loyalty during coronavirus lockdown in an Indian major nationalized bank’s point of view is yet to be studied. This examination tries to fill that gap. The primary objective is to study the consumers’ perception or satisfaction in respect of service quality delivery of a major nationalized bank of India in the COVID-19 pandemic situation. In this study, we have taken the help of SERVQUAL model to identify the consumers’ perception in respect of the service delivery dimensions of the branches of a major nationalized bank in certain assigned location. In this study, the key dimensions we have chosen are as follows: a. reliability; b. ease of access; c. security; d. responsiveness; e. empathy and f. ease of use which have been adopted from the studies by Zeithami et al. but modified by the researchers according to situational and contingent purpose. A quantitative, descriptive research design has been used. A survey method has been used to collect the data. For this study, the population (target) comprises the consumers of North 24 Parganas Branches of State Bank of India (SBI) – Indian major nationalized bank; there were a lot of consumers, but in the COVID situation, it is next to impossible to determine the total population. However, this study specifically focused on the three selected branches of SBI in North 24 Parganas District, Belghoria, Kamarhati and Agarpara branches, and the study has been done from 2 April 2020 to 14 May 2020. The branch selection was based on proximity and convenience for data collection, and willingness of the consumers to share their views through the questionnaire set and distributed through Google Forms. In this study, due to several constraint factors during COVID situation, we have distributed the questionnaire in Google Forms to 259 online bank service users of SBI consumers, among which only nine forms unreturned and we have received 250 forms as response. Using SPSS version 25.0, we have analysed the data. We have used different statistical tools for analysing the data. The outcome of this research study implicates that the different customized dimensions of e-SERVQUAL influence e-service quality vis-à-vis consumers’ satisfaction of SBI consumers, and among the dimensions, except ease of access, other adopted dimensions have great impact of online banking service quality of consumers of SBI. This denotes that these dimensions or measurement variables are perceived to be critical for the consumers of SBI. This chapter represents an insight of the consumers’ satisfaction with respect to different customized e-SERVQUAL dimensions in respect of intangible banking service interface in pandemic situations.