Building customer loyalty in digital banking: the roles of brand trust and greenwashing

Customer loyalty has become increasingly difficult to sustain in the digital banking era, where technological innovation, branding, and sustainability initiatives jointly shape customer evaluations. However, prior studies have largely examined these factors independently, providing limited understanding of how they collectively influence loyalty formation and under what conditions sustainability initiatives remain effective. To address this gap, this study develops and empirically tests an integrated model of customer loyalty by examining the roles of corporate social responsibility (CSR), brand personality, brand association, AI marketing, and green marketing, while positioning brand trust as a key relational mechanism and greenwashing as a boundary condition. Data were collected from 302 banking customers in Vietnam and analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling. The results show that CSR and brand personality significantly enhance brand trust, with CSR exerting a slightly stronger effect. Brand trust emerges as the strongest predictor of customer loyalty, whereas AI marketing, green marketing, and brand association also contribute positively to loyalty formation. In contrast, perceived greenwashing significantly weakens the positive effect of green marketing on customer loyalty. The study contributes to customer loyalty and banking literature by demonstrating that trust remains the dominant mechanism underlying loyalty formation even in highly digitalized banking environments and by showing that the effectiveness of green marketing depends on perceived authenticity. The findings further suggest that banks should prioritize trust-building strategies, embed CSR within core operations, deploy AI to support customer decision-making, and ensure consistency between sustainability claims and actual practices to strengthen long-term customer loyalty.