Abstract

Currently, financial institutions incur huge expenditure to implement and maintain mobile banking (m-Banking) solutions and this cost is bound to rise significantly, as more customers subscribe to m-Banking services. Cloud computing has potential to facilitate reduced cost, high scalability and a variable cost structure that could guarantee cheaper, reliable and sustainable m-Banking in the long term. While the adoption of organizational private clouds seems natural for banks because of the sensitive nature of banking transactions, some have argued for the adoption of public clouds as a better alternative, despite concerns on issues such as trust, security and privacy. However, there is lack of sufficient empirical evidence in the literature on the suitability of public clouds for m-Banking. Hence, this study presents an investigation of the use of public cloud for m-Banking. A prototype cloud-based m-Banking application was developed using a public platform-as-a-service (Paas) cloud model, which was evaluated for usability and robustness in a controlled experiment. The evaluation result shows that m-Banking on public cloud is viable, if the cloud-based application is sufficiently robust and usable. The result also indicates that m-Banking services on public cloud are suitable for adoption by the banking industry.

Keywords:

Cloud computing, mobile cloud banking, mobile computing, robustness, usability,

References

1. Alam, S.B., H.M.D. Kabir, M.N. Sakib and A.B.M.R. Sazzad, 2010. A secured electronic transaction scheme for mobile banking in Bangladesh incorporating digital watermarking. Proceeding of IEEE International Conference on Information Theory and Information Security (ICITIS, 2010), pp: 98-102.
   
2. Ayo, C.K., U.I. Ukpere, A. Oni, U. Omote and D. Akinsiku, 2012. A prototype mobile money implementation in Nigeria. Afr. J. Bus. Manage., 6(6): 2195-2201.
   
3. Berander, P., 2004. Using students as subjects in requirements prioritization. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (ISESE'04), pp: 167-176.
   CrossRef    
4. Crossman, P., 2010. Banks take to Cloud Computing, Bank System and Technology Survey.
   Direct Link
5. Hughes, N. and S. Lonie, 2007. M-PESA: Mobile money for the "unbanked" turning cell phones into 24-hour tellers in Kenya. Innov. Technol. Gov. Globaliz., 2(1-2): 63-81.
   CrossRef    
6. Ibikunle, F.A. and Z.O. Mayo, 2012. A model for implementing mobile banking in developing countries (e.g. Nigeria). Int. J. Eng. Technol., 2(3), ISSN 2049-3444.
   
7. IBM News, 2012. Leading Pakistan Mobile Banking Provider Uses IBM Cloud to Expand Delivery of Secure Financial Services on Mobile Phones.
   Direct Link
8. Lewis, J.R., 2001. Introduction: Current issues in usability testing. Int. J. Hum-Comput. Int., 13(4): 343-349.
   
9. Lewis, J.R., 2006. Sample sizes for usability tests: Mostly math, not magic. Interactions, 13(6): 29-33.
   CrossRef    
10. Mallat, N., M. Rossi and V. Tuunainen, 2004. Mobile banking services. Communi. ACM, 47(5): 42-46.
    CrossRef    
11. Mell, P. and T. Grance, 2011. The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing. Special Publication 800-145, National Institute of Standards and Technology. Retrieved form: .
    CrossRef    
12. Nielsen, J and T. Landauer, 1993. A mathematical model of the finding of usability problems, Proceedings of the INTERACT '93 and CHI '93 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp: 206-213.
    CrossRef    PMid:8348158    
13. Niroshinie, F., S. Loke and W. Rahayu, 2013. Mobile cloud computing: A survey. Future Gener Comp. Sy., 29: 84-106.
    CrossRef    
14. Runeson, P., 2003. Using students as experiment subjects-an analysis on graduate and freshmen student data. Proceeding of 7th International Conference on Empirical Assessment and Evaluation in Software Engineering (EASE'03), pp: 95-102.
    
15. Sauro, J. and E. Kindlund, 2005. A method to standardize usability metrics into a single score. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '05), pp: 401-409.
    CrossRef    
16. Sheard, S. and A. Mostashari, 2008. A framework for system resilience discussions. Proceedings of the 18th Annual International Symposium of INCOSE. Utrecht, Netherlands.
    
17. Svahnberg, M., A. Aurum and C. Wohlin, 2008. Using students as subjects-an empirical evaluation. Proceeding of 2nd International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, pp: 288-290.
    CrossRef    
18. Turner, C.W., J.R. Lewis and J. Nielsen, 2006. Determining Usability Test Sample Size. In: Karwowski W. (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ergonomics and Human Factors. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, pp: 3084-3088.
    
19. UNCTAD, 2007. Science and technology for development: A new paradigm for ICT. Information Economy Report, New York.
    
20. Viale, E., 2011. Cloud Computing Changes the Game.
    Direct Link
21. Wijetunge, S., P. Wijesinghe and U. Gunawardana, 2008. Social impact of SMS in Sri Lanka. Proceeding of 4th International Conference on Information and Automation for Sustainability (ICIAFS, 2008), pp: 346-350.
    CrossRef    
22. Wohlin, C., P. Runeson, M. Höst, M.C Ohlsson, B. Regnell and A. Wesslén, 2000. Experimentation in Software Engineering: An Introduction. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, MA, USA.
    CrossRef    

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.