Interest in electronic commerce and electronic markets has largely been focused on North America and Europe and yet there are many interesting developments taking place in the Arab Gulf region, which have received very little attention. This study aims to address these issues. This research has been focused on identifying and highlighting the main potential factors or impediments that are currently inhibiting the incorporation or adoption of electronic commerce (EC) applications expansion in the Omani Banking sector. Data, obtained for the first time, were collected using semi-structured interviews and survey questionnaire as well as reviewing some bank documents. The study explores the slow uptake of EC applications in the banking industry. The objective of this study, therefore, is to examine a number of factors, both internal (i.e. organisational) and external (i.e. industrial), that are responsible for the slow utilisation of EC applications. The results provide a pragmatic picture about the adoption of EC applications in the core financial sector domain of Oman. One of the main findings is that security and data confidentiality issues have been a major barrier. The banking sector was reluctant to use e-commerce applications as they felt that transactions conducted electronically were open to hackers and viruses, which are beyond their control. Lack of top management support was found to be an inhibiting factor in the adoption of electronic commerce applications. In general, banks in the Arab Gulf region have been 'quite slow' to launch e-banking services. While they are convinced that online services reduce overheads significantly, a mixture of customer insecurities, technology investment costs and a lack of market-readiness have all conspired to make e-banking 'unattractive'. These inhibiting factors need to be identified and then addressed, so that the banking sector in Oman can exploit the potential advantages of EC to remain competitive.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Volume (Year): 1 (2006) Issue (Month): 2 (January) Pages: 155-172 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF