Trust in financial services: the influence of demographics and dispositional characteristics

So far, very little attention has been paid to examining consumer perceptions of trust from an interdisciplinary perspective. The purpose of this study is to examine how consumer trusting belief and disposition to trust within the financial services sector vary on the basis of individual demographic differences in trust. The research provides new insights into how consumers with higher dispositional trust have higher institutional trust and higher trusting belief and how consumers’ trusting belief significantly differs according to their demographic background in terms of age, marital status, ethnicity and gross annual income. The findings offer useful insights for the managers in financial institutions to carefully consider the impact of the influence of these individual differences on consumer behaviour in order to serve the needs of consumers in their target market and be able to design financial products and develop trust building strategies to attract and retain them. They also call for the action of the regulators and the financial institutions to play their part in building strong institutional systems that contribute to engendering higher levels of consumer trust

TRUST IN CROSS-CULTURAL B2B FINANCIAL SERVICE RELATIONSHIPS: THE ROLE OF SHARED VALUES

This is the accepted version of the following article: Houjeir, R. & Brennan, R. J, 'Trust in cross-cultural b2b financial service relationships: The role of shared values', Journal of Financial Services Marketing, June 2016, Vol 21(2): 90-102 The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/fsm.2016.4Trust in business-to-business supplier–customer relationships in financial services is an area of considerable research interest. The bulk of prior empirical research in this field has concentrated on trust in business relationships within a Western cultural context. However, shared values are acknowledged to be an important antecedent to trust. The premise of this study is that in circumstances where there are substantial cultural differences between parties to a supplier–customer relationship, these differences will be reflected in shared values, which will in turn be reflected in differences in the nature of trust. A qualitative study was conducted among business bankers and their corporate clients in the context of the United Arab Emirates. In all 170 respondents were interviewed; of these, 160 were paired respondents, that is, where a client and banker from the same business relationship were interviewed (yielding 80 interview dyads). Substantial differences with respect to trust were found between relationships that involved only Emiratis, those that involved Emiratis and non-Emiratis, and those that involved only non-Emiratis. For Emiratis mutual trust is substantially based on family and clan ties and exhibits strongly affective characteristics. For non-Emiratis trust is largely based on business considerations, and exhibits strongly cognitive characteristics.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Introducing a composite measure of trust in financial services

Existing trust scales generally measure aspects of trustworthiness and not trust per se. Trust is a broader concept encompassing attributes of the trustee, trustor and the situation/context. The purpose of this study is to develop a composite measurement scale for trust in financial services that incorporates elements of these three facets of trust. The study draws on interdisciplinary theories and adopts a broadly quantitative approach to develop, test and validate a five-dimensional scale for measuring trust in financial services. The trust scale for financial services developed through this study has five dimensions (5Cs): character-competence, congruence, communication, commitment and context. The scale provides a holistic conceptualisation of trust and displays solid psychometric properties. A comprehensive interdisciplinary trust scale for financial services, with strong reliability and validity, holds important managerial implications, its ability to capture the attributes of the trustee, trustor and financial system attesting to its suitability as a diagnostic tool to measure trust more robustly. Our trust scale has significant practical implications, offering useful insights for policymakers, commercial organisations and other stakeholders. This is the first trust scale for financial services that captures the attributes of trustee, trustor and context, reconcilling tensions between the conceptualisation and operationalisation of trust