How Technology Shapes the Actor-Network of Convergence Services: A Case of Mobile Banking

The continuous advancement of mobile technologies offers an opportunity for mobile carriers and banks to offer mobile banking services. However, such convergence of services from mobile carriers and banks raises many complex issues, particularly because it requires alliances among the actors who have different and sometimes conflicting interests. Using the mobile banking sector in Korea, this paper examines how the alliances between mobile carriers, banks, and other related parties are formed, and analyzes how technology affects competition and collaboration among them when a new convergence service is created by two, previously unrelated industries, in this case, by banks and mobile carriers. In so doing, we use the actor– network theory (ANT). As ANT helps analyze how actors form alliances and enroll other actors including nonhuman actors (i.e., technology) to secure their interests through the use of the technology, there is a fit between ANT and the emergence of new, converged services. This paper shows that it is technology that shapes the actor–network of convergence services, and that competition between banks and mobile carriers in mobile banking is about how to inscribe their interests in a given technology and thereby who can translate customers into their own network.