Mobile financial services in Bangladesh: Understanding the affordances
Ummaha Hazra and
Asad Priyo
MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany
Abstract:
Mobile financial services (MFS) have the potential to impact developing countries by making financial services more accessible. To realize this potential, it is imperative to illuminate why and how people use these new platforms to accomplish their goals. Using affordance theory as a guiding tool, this study aims to uncover the underlying goal directed affordances and actualization techniques used by MFS users in Bangladesh. The data are collected through in-depth interviews with MFS users and analyzed using thematic analysis to uncover affordances along with actualization techniques that are embedded in everyday social contexts of the users. The study finds that users in their attempts to accomplish specific goals uncover various latent affordances of MFS platforms such as financial services accessibility, self-controlling ability, spatial and temporal mobility, disintermediation ability, self-sustainability, secrecy maintainability, and networkability, and employ several techniques to actualize those affordances. These results have implications for utilizing MFS platforms to promote ICT4D goals.
Keywords: affordances; ICT4D; mobile financial services (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O31 O33 O35 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-12-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/117852/1/MFS_Paper_EJISDC_MPRA.pdf original version (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:117852
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().