Background: One the latest developments in the banking sector are online banks, which provide their services only online while physical offices are not available. Market research conducted in Germany, have shown that Germans are hesitating to adopt to the digital offered banking services. The major barrier for adoption is due to trust issues, which are rooted in perceived security and privacy protections. Earlier literature has found that other website interaction factors are also playing a role in order to enhance the trustworthiness of a website. Trust is a necessity in every economic and social relationship, since all relationships involve a possibility that one of the actors behaves opportunistically, and takes advantage of the other actor. The chance of opportunistic behavior contributes to the level of judged risk in the specific relationship, and together with trust ultimately affects the adoption of online banks. In order for users to become consumers of an online bank, they need to judge the online bank website as trustworthy. These judgments can be done either intuitively or throughout reasoning, considering information. The marketing field is emphasizing that intuitive judgments are essential in order to attract new consumer. However, the psychology field is stressing that even though most individuals tend to rely on intuitive judgments, these can be wrong since they can be based on heuristics and include biases. Purpose: In order to understand the formation of judgments by users of an online bank website, the purpose of our thesis is twofold. First, to measure the relationships between the website interaction factors and the concepts trust and risk. Second, with a lower degree of ambition, the purpose is to measure the relationship between intuitive and reasoned trust judgments. Methodology: The study was conducted through a quantitative research method. A six-point scale questionnaire was used in order to examine the relationships between trust, risk and the website interaction factors. A web-based questionnaire was sent out to German web users, where in total 122 respondents responded. The sample was equally split into online bank consumers and non-consumers. The statistical analysis of the data revealed results enabling to fulfill the purpose. Results: The findings of our thesis demonstrate that online bank consumers and non-consumers do not significantly differ in their judgments regarding the websites. The perceptions of the information quality, security and privacy protection are found as the most influential website interaction factors towards the trust judgments. Privacy and security protection are mostly influence website users in their risk judgment. Our study further reveals that online bank website users make their trust judgments through the first impression while further considerations of the websites' content enhance their trust judgments.

Digitalization is increasing in our society and continues to move in that direction. The shift from traditional banks to online banks is becoming more popular, and with an online bank, the international markets open. Although previous research about internationalization exists, there is no in-depth research on the specific topic of online banks. This study aims to provide information regarding how online banks internationalize, to understand the underlying factors for the process better as well as provide recommendations for both online banks but also traditional banks. Factors such as motivators, the entrepreneur, and resources are investigated to find an answer to the given research question. The way of internationalization is connected to the already pre-existing strategies of global or regional markets. The third theoretical concept that is applied to understand the internationalization process is which path of internationalization is used, either Born Global or Born Regional. This thesis is a qualitative study with a deductive approach. The empirical findings are derived from case studies through semi-structured interviews, and the sampling selection is online retail banks operating in Europe, with more than one million customers. The selected cases are Revolut, N26, Monzo, and Monese, where one interview per bank is conducted. The interviewee’s understanding of the subject is gathered in the empirical findings, through summarizing the transcription of the actual interviews. The researchers are analyzing the internationalization process and present both similarities and differences between the cases and connect it to the prevalent theories. In conclusion, some statements are drawn that highlight the importance of traditional banks to follow the new shift towards more simplified banking with understandable products that aim to help the people. This study, therefore, contributes not only to the theoretical understanding of the subject, but it also offers practical implications both for traditional and online retail banks