Abstract

The mobile banking industry has grown to become Ghana's most popular digital financial service (DFS). Since its inception in 2018, the first interoperable system in Africa has allowed transactions between Ghana's various telecommunication companies and banks. Today, the mobile banking and financial services sectors have seen immense turmoil, including cybercrime on mobile banking transactions. It generally involves the manipulation of customers' accounts without authorization, prompts sent under the pretext of a telco promotion, fake SMS sent to indicate a deposit into a customer's account, and fraudsters posing as delivery companies instructing customers to deposit to a mobile banking account in exchange for delivering goods. This study premises to determine how applicable Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) is to explaining mobile banking-related cybercrime. Therefore, this work seeks to analyze mobile banking merchants' attitudes and intentions to secure transaction-related data in light of mobile banking services in Ghana. Finally, this study empirically tests the theoretical model with a data set representing the survey and the responses of 410 mobile banking merchants in the greater Accra region of Ghana. Partial least squares structural equation models (PLS-SEM) are used in analyzing the data since the method facilitates assessing patterns of causation of target constructs in the proposed model. The study results suggest that the perceived probability of Vulnerability was not a significant predictor of Intention to secure information or Attitude toward securing information. The perceived severity of the threat also has a positive relationship with the Attitude toward securing information but is not significant. Perceived self-efficacy has a negative relationship with the Intention to secure information but is not significant. The most vital relationship emerged where the perceived severity of the threat significantly predicted the Intention to secure information. Perceived response efficacy significantly predicted Intention to secure information and positively predicted Attitude toward securing information. Finally, the results also indicated that perceived self-efficacy significantly impacted attitudes toward securing information.