Awareness and Adoption of Technology in Banking Especially by Rural Areas Customers: A Study of Udaipur Rural Belt

ICT has been the cornerstone of recent financial sector reforms aimed at increasing the speed and reliability of financial operations and initiatives to strengthen the banking sector. The intense competitive environment is continuously forcing the banks to become customercentric. Today technology has emerged as a strategic resource for achieving higher efficiency, control of operations, productivity and profitability for Banks as well as it is the realization of their 'anywhere, anytime, anyway' banking dream for customers. But instead of all these benefits, the awareness and adoption rate of banking services among the rural customers is still found very low. Hence this paper presents the preliminary findings on investigation of the level of the customer's awareness as well as adoption of banking services by the rural customers based on demographics, bank type, familiarity with computer/internet.