Towards loyalty development in the e‐banking business

The purpose of this paper is to put forward a descriptive model that characterizes customer loyalty in the context of electronic banking. Owing to the high costs involved in increasing the current client base, one of the main goals of banks and other financial services providers that operate through the internet should be to develop customer loyalty in order to improve their results.

The paper analyzes the loyalty development process in the e‐banking context. The data were collected through a web survey using Spanish‐speaking subjects. The contrasts of the research model and measurement validation were based on exploratory analyses and structural equations models.

The findings showed that web site perceived reputation and satisfaction have a direct and significant effect on consumer loyalty to a financial services web site. In addition, the analyses have shown that perceived reputation is particularly influenced by the satisfaction with previous interactions with the web site.

The paper suggests that the proper management of both customer needs and corporate reputation will help to increase customer loyalty and, as a consequence, the retention‐rate and profits in the e‐banking business.

This study presents three main contributions: the role of satisfaction is looked at as an antecedent of loyalty in e‐banking; the satisfaction‐reputation relationship is analyzed in the online context (this relationship has received very little attention so far); and there is an analysis of the effect of reputation on the long‐term orientation of the relationship.