Customer loyalty toward mobile wallet apps in the post-COVID-19 period: The moderating role of customer engagement in Jordan

Type of the article: Research ArticleAbstractThe COVID-19 boosted the adoption of mobile wallets, which resulted in heightened competition among the digital payment providers, and customer loyalty became a decisive factor to remain in use. This paper examines customer loyalty determinants to mobile wallet applications in Jordan by applying the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to determine trust, information quality, perceived security, customer engagement, and moderating effect of engagement. Online survey of the users of mobile wallets in Amman, Jordan, from January to April 2025, was used to collect the data that consisted of 365 valid responses. The proposed model was tested using the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings have shown significant positive impact of customer loyalty on perceived usefulness (β = 0.24, p = 0.001), perceived ease of use (β = 0.21, p = 0.001), information quality (β = 0.18, p = 0.003), trust (β = 0.27, p = 0.001), perceived security (β = 0.22, p = 0.001), and customer engagement (β = 0.20, p = 0.00). The customer engagement has a moderate moderating effect on the relationships between the perceived usefulness and loyalty (β = 0.130, p = 0.006) and between the trust and the loyalty (β = 0.150, p = 0.001), but other paths do not have significant moderating effect. The model describes 64% in customer loyalty. The results show the significance of functional value, trust, and customer engagement in maintaining mobile wallets use in emerging economies and empirically support the idea of extending TAM to digital financial services setting.