Effects of two national environmental factors on e-commerce functionality adoption: a cross-country case study of a global bank

In order to offer new services and gain competitive advantages, e-commerce has been widely adopted, particularly in the banking industry. Unfortunately, despite the growing adoption of e-commerce in the banking industry, the issue that web-based B2C e-commerce functionality adoption varies between banks or a bank's branches across nations has not received sufficient attention. Many factors affect e-commerce functionality adoption. However, two national environmental factors (information infrastructure and demographics) are particularly important because they relate to the availability of technologies in use and the characteristics of customers, respectively. This research conducts a cross-country case study of a global bank's Beijing (China), Chicago (USA), and Dubai (UAE) branches to investigate how the two national environmental factors affect e-commerce functionality adoption. The specific objectives are to discover how information infrastructure (measured by number of PCs per 1000 people and Internet access cost) and demographics (measured by population composition and income) affect e-commerce functionality adoption of the global bank's three branches. Secondary data were collected for information infrastructure and demographics; additionally, focused interviews with these three branches' IT and business managers provided sources for answering 'how'. The key finding demonstrates that the differences in e-mail ordering and online shopping adoptions between these branches are mainly attributed to proposed factors of population composition and Internet access cost, and the new factor of individual credit reference system. This research contributes to theory development in this emerging important research subject.