Effectiveness of Commercial Banks’ Strategies on the Frequency of Customers’ ATM Card Usage: A Case of Commercial Banks in Embu West District, Kenya

Abstract

The emergence of Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) has caused the greatest transformation in the banking industry. Its introduction significantly revolutionized the practice of banking by availing accessibility on a 24-hour day basis and reducing substantially the number of bank tellers. Despite this transformation and 23 years after the first ATM was introduced in Kenya, the ATMs have not achieved full adoption. The ATM usage stands at 13.4% nationally. This study therefore sought to explore the effectiveness of strategies applied by commercial banks in Kenya so as to achieve the full adoption of ATMs by customers. The exploratory research design was used in this study with a target population of 128,458 bank customers. Stratified random sampling was used to get a sample size of 384 bank customers and census survey was conducted for the 8 bank managers in the 8 commercial banks of Embu West district. Data collection was done using two sets of questionnaires; one for the bank managers and another one for the bank customers. The tools were pre-tested at Chuka town in Meru South district on 19 bank customers and 4 bank managers. The pre-test obtained a reliability coefficient of 0.7483 on customers’ questionnaire and 0.7128 on bank managers’ questionnaire. The two set of questionnaires were thus considered reliable because the reliability coefficient exceeded 0.70. Data analysis was done using the descriptive and inferential statistics. The results obtained from the study implied that commercial banks’ strategies of accessibility, security, cost reduction, advertising, added benefits and market segmentation were significant in influencing customer usage of ATM cards. These findings would be useful in strategy evaluation by bank managers in improving the management of the ATM delivery channels.