A cheaper account, better rewards or a competitive interest rate may attract a banking customer.
They may not be enough to make that customer trust the bank.
New South African research suggests that trust in retail banking is built through a much broader combination of value, employee competence, personalised relationships and whether customers believe the bank genuinely puts their needs first.
But the study uncovered something even more interesting for marketers.
When customers already have a strong impression of a bank’s corporate image or believe that its values align with their own, they appear to rely less heavily on individual service experiences when deciding whether the bank can be trusted.
In other words, a strong brand can become a mental shortcut.
Researchers Daniel Petzer and Mornay Roberts-Lombard reached the finding after surveying 352 South African retail banking customers and examining the monetary and non-monetary factors that contribute to trust and future behavioural intentions.
Trust is about more than what the account costs
Banks frequently compete through monetary value.
Fees are reduced. Interest rates are advertised. Rewards programmes become more generous. Customers are shown what they could save or earn by choosing one provider over another.
The study confirms that perceived value matters for trust.
But money was only one part of the relationship.
The researchers also examined three non-monetary factors: employee competence, intimacy and customer centricity.
Employee competence concerns whether customers believe banking employees have the knowledge and ability to handle their financial needs properly.
Intimacy reflects the more personal side of the relationship, including whether the bank understands the customer and develops a closer relationship with them.
Customer centricity asks whether customers believe the bank genuinely structures its service around their needs rather than simply selling products.
All three were positively associated with trust. This presents a useful marketing lesson.
A banking relationship is not judged only according to the product customers receive. It is also judged according to what customers repeatedly experience around that product.
Making it difficult to leave did not build trust
One result stood out.
The researchers also measured calculative commitment, which reflects a customer’s rational assessment of whether remaining with a bank is preferable because switching could involve costs, inconvenience or lost benefits.
Unlike the other proposed drivers, calculative commitment did not have a significant positive influence on trust.
That distinction is important.
A customer can stay with a bank without necessarily trusting it.
They may remain because moving debit orders is irritating, because their salary already enters that account or because changing providers seems like unnecessary work.
That is retention. It is not necessarily loyalty.
And as digital banking makes opening and switching accounts easier, relying on inconvenience as a retention strategy becomes increasingly fragile. The researchers argue that lower switching barriers make convenience and the overall experience more important than customers simply feeling economically tied to one institution.
For marketers, the implication is clear: customers who stay because leaving is difficult should not automatically be treated as customers who love the brand.
Trust sits between experience and future behaviour
The researchers did not examine trust as an isolated attitude.
They tested whether it helped explain what customers intended to do next.
Trust significantly mediated the relationship between the factors customers experienced and their future behavioural intentions.
That means perceived value, competent employees, personal relationships and customer-focused service were not simply positive experiences in their own right.
They helped build trust, and that trust was associated with how customers intended to behave towards the bank in future.
This is particularly important in financial services because customers are being asked to place more than a purchase in a company’s hands.
A bank may hold their salary, savings, personal information, debt and long-term financial products.
Marketing in this environment therefore cannot rely entirely on generating attention.
The brand has to reduce uncertainty.
A strong brand changes how customers judge the experience
Perhaps the most interesting finding concerns corporate image and shared values.
Both influenced how customers converted their day-to-day experiences into trust.
However, the moderation was largely negative.
At first glance, that sounds like bad news. It is not necessarily.
The researchers argue that when a bank already possesses a strong corporate image, customers can begin using that reputation as a cognitive shortcut.
Instead of examining every employee interaction or service encounter in isolation, customers may begin with a broader assumption that the institution is dependable.
Similarly, where customers feel that a bank shares their values, individual monetary and interpersonal cues can become less influential in determining trust.
This is what makes branding commercially valuable beyond recognition.
A brand is not merely the logo customers remember when they see an advertisement.
Over time, it can become part of the mechanism customers use to evaluate risk.
This is where marketing and customer experience meet
Banks often separate brand marketing from service delivery.
The marketing team manages campaigns, sponsorships, positioning and reputation.
Operations manages the branch. Digital teams manage the app. Customer-service employees deal with problems.
From the customer’s perspective, those distinctions largely disappear.
A television advertisement may tell someone that a bank puts customers first. The mobile app then has to make that claim believable. A call-centre interaction can reinforce it or destroy it. A fee customers regard as unfair can contradict months of carefully designed brand messaging.
Trust therefore accumulates across the entire experience.
The study recommends that banks combine perceived value with knowledgeable employees, personalised engagement, transparency and genuine customer-focused service.
That is relationship marketing in practical terms.
The strongest banking brands need to earn the shortcut
There is also a risk in interpreting corporate image as a substitute for service quality.
A reputation can simplify the way customers assess a bank, but reputation itself has to come from somewhere.
Repeated poor experiences can eventually change the very corporate image that previously protected the brand.
The study was also cross-sectional and used purposive and quota sampling, meaning it identifies relationships between the variables rather than proving that one directly causes another across the entire South African population.
Still, its central lesson is commercially useful.
Banks compete with rates, rewards, apps and products that competitors can often imitate.
Trust is harder to copy.
It develops when value, service, employees and the wider meaning of the brand consistently tell customers the same thing.
And once that reputation becomes strong enough, customers may no longer need to reassess the bank from scratch every time they interact with it.
That may be one of the most valuable advantages a financial-services brand can build.
Source Information
Study Title: Is trust about more than just money? Insight into South African banking customers
Authors: Daniel J. Petzer and Mornay Roberts-Lombard
Journal: European Business Review
Published: February 2026
DOI: 10.1108/EBR-05-2025-0160
