An Empirical Study of Customer Loyalty to Internet Banking in China

Abstract

The rapid development of information technology and the severe competition of the bank industry make the internet banking become a new service channel for Chinese banks to acquire new customers and to retain the existing customers. Because the larger part of the profit in internet banking is from the existing customers, Chinese banks have been making their great efforts in order to win the market share by means of retaining loyal customers in recent years. Meanwhile, the studies as to the factors affecting the customer loyalty to internet banking are arousing the interest and attention of more and more scholars in China. This study is to try to find the factors affecting customer loyalty in internet banking, i.e., to investigate the roles of trust and satisfaction in customer loyalty to internet banking in China theoretically and empirically. A model is built with customer loyalty as the endogenous variable, with service quality, brand image and perceived value as exogenous variables, and with satisfaction and trust as mediating variables. Based on data from a sample of 429 internet banking customers collected through a field and an online survey, the results find all the causal relationships in the model significant by using structural equation modeling. Theoretical and managerial implications are provided at the end of the study.