E-Banking Background in Taiwan
In early 1990s, with the rapid growth of information technology (IT) and electronic services, banks began to offer Internet banking services (Jenkins,
2007). Beginning in 1997, Taiwan-based banks such as The Shanghai Commercial & Savings Bank aggressively promoted Internet banking services.
In May 1999, Taiwan's Bureau of Monetary Affairs in the Ministry of Finance announced the Master Agreement of Personal Computer (PC) and Network Banking Services for commercial banks offering e-banking services, which governed how commercial banks could offer e-banking services such as fund transfers and account summaries (Shih & Fang, 2006). Taiwan's financial institutions were compelled to reintegrate in order to enhance service quality, operational efficiency, and competitiveness (Liu, 2010). There have been a series of innovative changes in online banking services since the growth of Internet-based services has changed the manner in which firms and consumers interact (Ho & Lin, 2010). Generally, using e-banking, firms can check account balances, transfer money, pay bills, collect receivables and ultimately reduce transaction costs and establish greater control over bank accounts (Riyadh, Akter, & Islam, 2009).In Taiwan, current online banking services provide dedicated services to firms to ensure integration of internal resources and reduction of costs. Moreover, in recent years, new electronic banking modes have also been established in Taiwan. In June 2007, the mobile banking services were offered by the three major mobile service providers, Chunghwa Telecom, Far EasTone, and Taiwan Mobile, in partnership with 20 banks (Lin,
2011). According to the most recent statistics from the Taiwan Network Information Center (TWNIC) (2010), 77% ofhouseholds in Taiwan have Internet access, and 69% of households have broadband access.
Widespread access to the internet has led to great expansion of e-businesses. Since Taiwanese SMEs often confront international business, B2B e-banking is not only beneficial but necessary. Big companies, however, are likely to be more efficacious in executing e-businesses or less likely to experience failure in implementing B2B e-business than SMEs. Since SMEs still underexploit the potential of e-business technologies (Ang & Husian, 2012) such as e-banking, there appears to be a need to focus on the SME sector. With this in mind, SMEs were chosen as the target population in this study.Due to slow adoption of e-banking services by SMEs, they have failed to exploit the value of e-banking (Riyadh et al., 2009), particularly in the B2B context. This is why B2B e-banking value assessment at the firm level is an important proposition for managers. Employees play the important roles of communicators, producers, and users of business knowledge in organizations. Further, they initiate and actualize e-business practices in the firm (Uusi-Rauva & Nurkka, 2010). Dealing with B2B e-banking systems is likely to be a routine job of employees. Even though B2B e-banking is one of the most efficient methods of delivering banking services to SMEs, its value is often unclear to employees of SMEs. Thus, value assessment of online B2B banking from employees’ perspective would be useful. Of course, understanding of employee value perceptions would be of interest to managers pursuing organizational alignment and formulating business strategies. Despite its importance, the employee perspective has been only lightly explored in the e-commerce literature. Consistent with previous studies (Mairesse & Greenan, 1999; Uusi-Rauva & Nurkka, 2010), the current study offers insights by concentrating on factors and inhibitors that shape B2B e-banking value from the perspective of employees at the firm-level. We believe that data collected from employees can effectively and substantially generate new insights at the firm level.