Abstract
As a part of Malaysia’s tourism landscape, the homestay business has gone through various changes in the dynamic tourism industry. It was initially developed to allow tourists and visitors to experience the social and natural heritages of the local people as they live their daily life. Just like any other business, homestay business is also being impacted by the rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT) including the disruptive development of financial technology or better known as Fintech. This is widely acknowledged as an innovative solution for financial transactions due to the great convenience that it offers not only to the consumers but also the business operators. However, as the homestay business in Malaysia tends to be operated among micro, small and medium enterprises, or to be more precise are mainly operated as personal or family businesses, the adoption of Fintech services is still at the infant stage among homestay operators. Realizing the significance of Fintech towards the development of homestay business in Malaysia, a qualitative method was adopted involving in-depth interviews of 30 homestay operators. The site of the study is in Sarawak, which is the largest state in Malaysia. An open-ended, in-depth interview method is adopted as it enables the homestay operators to give their views in a robust and detailed manner. This study is needed to identify the cause of low adoption rate among homestay operators, hence, initiating the knowledge and later actions to encourage the homestay operators to reap the benefits that the Fintech has to offer.
Highlights
Background of StudyThe business world has been experiencing expeditious development due to the disruptive innovations in information and communication technology (ICT)
Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in its report regarding the payment aspects in the recent era has highlighted the rise of one-stop applications that offer a wide selection of services such as e-commerce, e-hailing, food-delivery, e-payment et cetera known as the super apps, in which Grab application would be a relevant example of a super app in Malaysia (BIS, 2020)
Realizing the importance of smart application of ICT in tourism industry, this study aims to examine the awareness of Financial Technology (Fintech) as part of ICT development among homestay operators in Sarawak
Summary
The business world has been experiencing expeditious development due to the disruptive innovations in ICT. Despite the benefits it offers to the business society, rapid development in business IT potentially poses great threats to business organizations that cannot keep abreast with the development (Dian et al, 2018). Known as Fintech, has significantly impacted the financial service industry as it has been widely adopted by business operators throughout the globe (IMF, 2019). The emergence of these innovative technologies in recent years propelled the growth of Fintech such as artificial intelligence/machine learning, big data, robotic process automation and blockchain. Out of the aforesaid Fintech products, improved payment and lending services have become the utmost priority by Fintech companies across the globe followed by cryptocurrency and security sectors (Varga, 2017). Deloitte (2020) report claimed that Fintech has rapidly gaining favourable acceptance by customers as compared to conventional financial and banking services as a result of greater satisfaction experienced by the customers from the easy convenience that the customers enjoyed by using Fintech services
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