Internet Banking, age, gender, and performance: Which connections in Italy?

Internet banking has influenced community banking by changing the relationship between banks and their customers in the last few years. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how its use has impacted the performance and the branches. The innovation of the research lies in considering the percentage of Internet banking users and the demographic information: the age and gender of the users. The dataset includes 216 banks with 1296 observations from 2011 to 2016. The methodology used is a fixed-effect model. The results highlight that Internet banking harms the performance of Italian banks. However, the variable demographic of the age of users of Internet banking is attractive: only the group of users between 65–74 years old has a significant and negative impact on Italian branches. On the other hand, the gender of Internet banking users does not influence the reduction of the banks’ branches. This information could help the management develop marketing and communication policies for the target groups.