Behavioral investigation of trust building in online banking : new marketing methodology for Suruga Bank

Abstract

The recent financial crisis has brought a huge loss of faith in economic rationality and the economic discipline. For the current financial industry, how to re-build "Trust" with customers is the one of biggest issues. Although we know that the strong relationship between the deep level of trust and the banking business has high potential, it has not yet been optimized, especially in online transaction banking. This is in part due to customers' perception of higher risk in the absence of traditional face to face interaction. Recent findings have shown that facial cues can have a powerful impact on trust building. However, there is also evidence that images of faces in some cases can decrease online interactions. Thus, the goal of this thesis is to investigate the impact of different types of facial attributes and which customer profiles will most benefit from such facial images in online banking. In an experimental setting, this research created a personalized web site which features the banker's representative, and conducted an investment game in order to correlate them with investment performance. This research also included rating trustworthiness on a banking advisor's photo and a demographic questionnaire for statistic trust profiling. Understanding a subject's decision making mechanism by giving them advisor's facial stimuli in a naturalistic online context, with integrating communication will provide an important potential for building and promoting trust, which further suggest Suruga Bank will be in an unique position by capitalizing on the new marketing methodology.