Self-Service Technologies - A Silver Lining for Financial Inclusion

Abstract

After the advent of self-service technologies, there has been a great shift in the way customers interact with the service providers. Any change is not considered worth unless it is usable, understandable and finally adoptable by the user. It is really challenging to educate and convince a customer to get used to the newer technologies which facilitate faster transactions, provide cost advantages to service provider. Many organizations at one point of time highlighted their SST capability as USPs for e.g.: Canara bank was the first to release mobile ATMs in India and SBI also claimed that it has the largest number of ATMs in India. Change can happen any time, any form as it is imminent. If an organization doesn’t accept change, then it may end up being the architect of its own decaying incompetent business model.

Whenever an innovation happens its’ advantages should be disseminated and enough awareness should be created so that anxiety and skepticism should not find their place in the minds of people (Langer and Saegert, 1977). When companies introduce self service technologies, they have greater challenge of communicating, comforting the consumer to accept the change. At the same time they should be able to successfully measure the attitudes of people towards the technologies and focus on educating the segments which are not comfortable in using the self-service technologies. This paper is window opener to analyze consumer adoption of self-service technologies to assist the process of financial inclusion effectively.

Keywords: ATM, Self Service Technologies, Financial Inclusion