A Case Study on Kurdistan's Electronic Banks: Key Challenges Facing Consumers

With advances in technology, financial institutions and their users needed to turn to the modern style of banking which is called e-banking. It provides numerous profits for both organizations and individual customers in terms of the comfort, ease, and cost of transactions. The main purpose of this study is to investigate and identify key challenges facing consumers to utilize e-banking services. To accomplish the purpose and problem of the study, the researchers conducted a quantitative approach via an online survey among 62 respondents in Kurdistan Region Government (KRG) and the sampling was chosen randomly. The descriptive research approach has been used and the methodology of the study depends on both primary and secondary data. SPSS software and Microsoft Excel have been used to evaluate the collected data. The main results indicated that privacy and security issues have the most significant challenge that affects consumers while using e-banking services, about 21%, whereas knowledge issues have the least effect on them, about 3.2%. Moreover, the COVID-19 outbreak has hurt the e-banking system both in the Kurdistan Region and around the world since Chinese authorities first announced it in late 2019. If there was an effective online banking system in KRG, employees would have received their salaries without having any infections from others.