This study examines how FinTech platform service quality influences user loyalty in China, and focuses on two mediators: perceived switching costs and user trust. Data were collected from 290 Chinese commercial bank customers with active FinTech platform usage experience, using purposive sampling to ensure respondents had sufficient experience to evaluate the services. A hybrid Structural Equation Modeling-Artificial Neural Network (SEM-ANN) Approach is applied to test both linear and non-linear relationships. The findings from SEM show that service quality has positive effects on perceived switching costs, user trust, and user loyalty. User trust also positively affects loyalty. However, perceived switching costs do not show a significant direct effect on loyalty. This suggests that in mature markets, trust matters more than switching barriers. For mediation, user trust plays a significant partial mediating role. The indirect path through perceived switching costs is not significant. ANN sensitivity analysis confirms this: user trust has the highest predictive importance (100%), followed by service quality (78.29%). Perceived switching costs rank lowest (31.35%). This study makes contributions by verifying the dual-mediator model in China’s mature FinTech context, providing a framework for customer retention. Bank managers should build trust via service quality instead of artificial switching barriers.
Wang et al. (Tue,) studied this question.