ABSTRACT

The study provided empirical evidence on effect of consumer knowledge and attitude on use of cashless banking services among rural households in Abia State. Specifically, the study ascertained the respondents’ level of knowledge (K) of selected cashless banking services, respondents’ attitude (A) to selected cashless banking services, and the level of use/practice (P) of selected cashless banking services, among others. The study made use of multi-stage sampling procedure in selecting 180 respondents. Data for the study were collected with use of structured questionnaire on all the specific objectives of the study. Data collected were analysed with both descriptive and inferential statistics. The major results showed that the respondents generally had high level of knowledge of cashless banking services ( =3.43), positive attitude towards cashless banking services ( =2.57), and a relatively low use of cashless bank services ( =2.42). The result also revealed the respondents’ perceived benefits of cashless bank services as to ensure access to credit (81.1%), were portable (71.8%), gave cheaper access to banking services (71.1%), reduce risks of cash related crimes (70.0%), minimize labour cost and offer more service options (68.9%). It also promotes the usage of electronic products (67.6%), convenience (64.4%), help to track spending (56.6%), and is cost saving (53.4%). The result further revealed a grand mean of 3.41 for constraints in their use of cashless bank services. The result of hypothesis showed that there was a significant relationship between respondents’ knowledge and use of cashless banking services in the study area at percent level of probability. The result also showed that a positive significant relationship existed between respondents’ attitude and use of cashless banking services in the study area at 1%. A positive and significant relationship was revealed to exist between the socio-economic characteristics of the respondents and use of selected cashless banking services in the study area at 1%. The result also four showed a significant difference between respondents’ knowledge, attitude and use of selected cashless banking services in the study area at 5%. The study concluded that there was a relatively low use of cashless bank services among rural households in Abia State, Nigeria, and therefore, recommends that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), commercial and microfinance banks should put more efforts in educating the rural households on cashless banking services, especially on the use of credit cards, short message service (SMS) and internet banking as they recorded very low scores in their uses.