A Study on the Factors Affecting Adoption of Mobile Trading Apps and Moderating Role of Personalization

Abstract

Mobile trading apps have transformed the stock trading landscape completely by making it more inclusive and democratic. The trading apps are gaining popularity amongst retail as well as institutional investors and are essentially led by a new generation of investors. Therefore, in this study we employed the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2) to investigate the factors that triggers the mobile trading app adoption among investors. Six factors, namely Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Social Influence (SI), Facilitating Conditions (FC), Hedonic Motivation (HM) and Habit (HA) are taken from the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2) model. Moreover, many technology companies are using ‘personalization’ feature to offer customized features and design in the apps for users. Therefore, we also included ‘personalization’ as a moderating variable to understand its role in making trading apps more efficient for the users and stirring up its adoption. An online and manual survey data from 254 users were collected for this study and was analysed using structural equation modelling. The paper proposes a conceptual model for the trading app adoption and provides practical implications for the app developers and brokerage firms in the context of an emerging market like India.