The Relationship Between Mental Health and Mobile Banking Adoption: Evidence from Canada

Abstract

Mobile banking (m-banking) is the use of a mobile device such as a smartphone to do banking tasks. We investigate the direct and moderated effect of mental health on m-banking adoption. Moderators in our study are extracted from theories in technology adoption paradigm or from literature related to mental health. These variables are relationship satisfaction (RS), smartphone dependency (SD), and social networking/social media (SNS) use. We use the Canadian Internet Usage Survey conducted by Statistics Canada in 2020-21 as the main source of data. The impact of mental health on m-banking adoption is analyzed across levels of RS, SD, and SNS use. A fixed effect logistic regression model is utilized to investigate the relationship of variables, considering t he grouping based on province following the cluster sampling design of the dataset. Our results indicate that mental health significantly negatively affects m-banking adoption: better mental health outcomes are associated with lower likelihood of m-banking adoption. We observe that social media users and those that are more dependent on their smartphones are more likely to adopt m-banking, therefore one suggestion for banks is to use social media platforms as marketing channels. We do not find sufficient evidence that significant differences exist for the effect of mental health on m-banking adoption across levels of SNS, SD and RS.