آیا تفاوت های جنسیتی در قصد پیگیری بانکداری موبایل اسلامی نقش مهمی دارند؟ یک مطالعه تجربی Does gender differences play any role in intention to adopt Islamic mobile banking? An empirical study

1. Introduction Regardless of economic and political volatility in global banking industry, the Islamic banking is a rapid growing industry. The concept of Islamic banking has gained widespread attention of economist, bankers, financial experts and investors from global traditional banking industry. The history of establishment of present Islamic banks can be traced back from 1940s (Khan and Bhatti, 2008) and since then it has become huge trillion dollar industry. According to Islamic Financial Services Board (2015), there are more than 400 Islamic banks and approximately 191conventional banks with Islamic banking window operating in more than 75 countries. Tremendous growth and worldwide expansion of Islamic banking industry in the global financial markets are the main reasons behind it. The recent world Islamic competiveness report stated 16% of compound annual growth rate in global Islamic finance industry from 2010 to 2014 (Ernst & Young, 2016). It has become huge industry with assets reported in 2014 were estimated to USD I.87 trillion. The operations of Islamic banking are built on unique value based system that protect both moral and material wellbeing of the individuals and the society. Islamic banking follows Shariah compliance derived from the Holy Quran which prohibits the Islamic banks to invest in toxic assets. Due to this limit, Islamic banks were not severely influenced by the financial crisis (Hassan and Dridi, 2010). This caught attention of several customers, investors and other stake holder adding further encouragement to the acceptance of Islamic banking. With the intention to compete with the conventional banking, Islamic banks are setting up themselves with innovative technologies to gain competitive edge and market share (Goh and Sun, 2014; Sun et al., 2012; Sadeghi and Hanzaee, 2010). One of the most recent invention is mobile banking (m-banking) which is the usage of mobile phone to conduct financial transaction (Yu, 2012). With the distribution of wireless access protocol (WAP), establishment of 3G and 4G technologies people’s life style has switched as round the clock connectedness turn out to be inevitable (Ha et al., 2012). This life style change has made commercial prospects for the banks to present high value m-banking services (Goh and Sun, 2014) while eliminating the conventional banking limitation of time and place (Lin, 2013). These current alterations in customer’s lifestyle suggests the need to reinvestigate, in new context, the individual perceptions about Islamic mobile banking. Further adding to, many of the technology adoption barriers like cost, access and service quality has been greatly reduced so Islamic banks must develop a deep insight of all the factors affecting the adoption m-banking as the new context may alter already theorized relationship insignificant and perhaps may establish new relationship (Johns, 2006).