Factors Affecting the E-Loyalty of Individual Customers Using E-Banking Services at Joint-Stock Commercial Banks

Abstract

Amid rapid digital transformation and intensifying competition from financial technology platforms, retaining loyal customers has become a strategic imperative for banks operating digital channels. This study investigates how four dimensions of electronic service quality, namely efficiency, reliability, privacy and security, and website and application design, influence the electronic loyalty of individual customers toward joint-stock commercial banks offering digital banking services, with electronic satisfaction posited as a full mediating factor. The primary objective is to determine whether these four dimensions jointly shape customer satisfaction and, through satisfaction, loyalty within a competitive, multi-bank setting in a rapidly digitizing emerging economy, addressing a gap where prior studies typically examined only a single bank or a subset of these dimensions in isolation. The study contributes by jointly testing all four dimensions alongside the mediating role of satisfaction across multiple banks and cities, verified through two complementary statistical criteria. Primary data were collected from 248 valid respondents through a structured questionnaire administered online and in person across four cities, and were analyzed using reliability testing, factor analysis, and structural equation modeling with 5,000 bootstrap resamples. All nine proposed hypotheses were supported at a high level of statistical significance: reliability exerted the strongest effect on satisfaction, followed by website and application design, efficiency, and privacy and security. Satisfaction strongly drove loyalty and fully mediated all four services quality to loyalty relationships, with the mediated effect exceeding 80 percent of the total effect in every case and direct path becoming non-significant once satisfaction was included. The model explained 53.7 percent of variance in satisfaction and 45.4 percent of variance in loyalty, and a post-hoc power analysis confirmed statistical power above 99.9 percent. These findings offer actionable evidence for bank managers prioritizing digital service-quality investments, particularly in transaction reliability, to build sustainable customer retention in competitive emerging markets.