Perceived Trust, Benefit and Risk as Determinants of Attitude toward Agency Banking among Existing Users in Kaduna State, Nigeria

Purpose: This study examines how perceived trust, perceived benefit and perceived risk are associated with attitude toward agency banking among existing agency banking customers of Deposit Money Banks in Kaduna State, Nigeria. Methodology: A descriptive cross-sectional survey was used. A structured questionnaire was administered to 384 existing agency banking users selected by convenience sampling (a target size from Krejcie & Morgan, 1970, which does not make the sample representative); 361 usable responses (about 94%) were analysed with Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS. Results and Conclusion: Perceived trust and perceived risk were significantly associated with attitude toward agency banking, positively and negatively respectively; perceived benefit was insignificant. Trust correlated slightly negatively with the outcome and positively with risk, a suppression pattern requiring cautious interpretation. The model explained 47.2% of the variance in the measured attitude construct. Implication of findings: Among current users, attitudes are more strongly associated with perceived risk and trust than with perceived benefit. Transaction security, agent supervision and visible consumer-protection safeguards, already required by the October 2025 CBN guidelines, are priority hypotheses for testing in studies that include non-users and use longitudinal or intervention designs.