Between Firewalls and Feelings: Modelling Trust and Commitment in Digital Banking Platforms

Digital banking has become part of everyday life in Aotearoa–New Zealand, offering convenience but also raising questions of trust, security, and long-term commitment. This study examines how service quality, security and privacy, user experience, emotional attachment, and perceived risk shape customer trust and commitment in digital banking platforms. Trust is positioned as a key mediating factor, guided by the Technology Acceptance Model, Commitment–Trust Theory, Service Quality Theory, and Perceived Risk Theory. An online survey of 111 digital banking users from diverse backgrounds was conducted, and Hayes’s PROCESS Model 4 was applied to test both direct and indirect relationships. The results show that security/privacy and emotional attachment are the strongest predictors of commitment, while service quality and user experience contribute indirectly through trust. This study adds three contributions. First, it explains customer commitment rather than intention. Second, it compares the indirect paths through trust from service quality, security and privacy, user experience, and emotional attachment within one model using bias corrected bootstrap confidence intervals. Third, in a sample with many experienced users, perceived risk shows no indirect effect, which suggests a boundary condition for risk focused models.