Explaining the intention to use social trading platforms: an empirical investigation

The enormous rise of financial technology companies has greatly challenged traditional financial institutions. One emerging innovation is “social trading” (ST), which combines the advantages of social networks and delegated trading. ST platforms represent a unique context of social media platforms, on which the impact of social influence on the potential customer’s intention to use is not well understood. Moreover, researchers and practitioners lack an understanding of the moderating role of the consumer’s previous experience regarding security trading. As research in the field of ST is rather young, our study aims to be the first to address these research gaps by developing and empirically validating a model from the potential customer’s perspective. We based our framework on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology and theory regarding social media and financial decision-making. Our results illustrate that performance-related aspects are the dominant determinants of behavioral intention for experienced users, whereas system-related and personal barriers affect behavioral intentions of the inexperienced group. Consequently, differences regarding performance expectancy, effort expectancy, security and risk aversion were identified. Our results indicate that current platform operators’ advertising approaches of communicating the simple functionality of the platform seem inappropriate to meet the consumer’s needs.