FACTORS AFFECTING AGENT BANKING SERVICE OUTREACH IN ETHIOPIA: IN THE CASE OF ADDIS ABABA CITY ADMINISTRATION

Abstract

Agent banking is a component of branchless banking that allows financial institutions to offer financial services outside the traditional brick-and-mortar bank premises. Accordingly, the general objective of the study was to identify the determinants that influence the adoption of agent banking in the peripheral urban areas of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and was conducted in Addis Ababa. Using a research approach with an explanatory and descriptive research design, the study found that the main agent banking problems included a lack of agent banking performance monitoring, insufficient understanding of existing data, applications, and IT across the organization in agent banking, and a failure to understand the customers' viewpoints in agent banking service outreach. In addition, there is a positive and significant relationship between awareness, attitude, ease of use, system excellence, information quality, location, agent quality, reliability, affordability, and technology in agent banking service outreach, and they have a statistically significant impact on the dependent variable "agent banking service outreach". Thus, this study concludes that the main determinates of agent banking service outreach included awareness, attitude, and ease of use, excellent system quality, information quality, location, agent quality, reliability, affordability, and technology. Thus, this study suggests that the bank may enhance and deploy more resources for use by agency banking agents to reduce information and system quality, and it may direct agency banking as a strategic resource for achieving higher efficiency, control of operations, and reduction of cost by replacing paper-based and labor-intensive methods with digital processes.