Behavioural Determinants and a Zero-Trust Architecture for Cloud-SaaS Adoption in Rural Cooperative Credit Societies: Evidence from Krishi Patpedhi Societies

Abstract

Primary Krishi Patpedhi Societies (PKPS) supply credit and savings to agrarian communities, yet remain constrained by manual record-keeping, weak security and scarce information-technology capacity. Building on an earlier readiness study, this paper reframes cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) adoption in rural cooperative finance as a joint behavioural-and-architectural problem. Two contributions are advanced. First, a model derived from the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) is specified and tested on survey data from 200 staff across 20 PKPS units, extending the canonical determinants with two context-specific constructs—security trust and cost sensitivity. Second, a zero-trust, offline-first SaaS reference architecture is proposed, mapped to Indian regulatory and international security standards, and evaluated on a working prototype. Results indicate that performance expectancy, facilitating conditions and security trust are the strongest positive drivers of adoption intention, whereas cost sensitivity exerts a significant negative effect; the model explains a substantial share of intention variance. The prototype sustained high transaction reliability under degraded and intermittent connectivity, where a conventional online-only client failed. The study concludes that affordable, trust-centric and connectivity-tolerant design—coupled with subsidised onboarding and training—offers a credible, scalable pathway to secure digital transformation and financial inclusion for rural cooperative banks.