The impact of the recent banking crisis on customer loyalty in the banking sector : Developing versus developed countries

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to ask two questions. How does the customer's loyalty in the banking sector change (at both the structural and quantitative level) in the light of the financial and banking crises? Are any differences observed in those changes between developing and developed countries? Design/methodology/approach – The paper consists of two parts: theoretical and empirical. In the theoretical part the authors discuss the nature of the banking and financial crises, the historical perspective of banking crises occurrence and main causes and consequences of those crises. The second part of the paper demonstrates statistical analysis of the obtained data from the Polish and European banking sector. The authors also present socio‐demographic characteristic of the research samples and the character of the bank‐client relations, comparative analysis of customer satisfaction index changes in the European banking sector and structural equation modes for the Polish banking sector for the years 2007‐2009. Findings – The analyses allowed the authors to confirm the main research hypotheses: first, clients of developing European countries demonstrate generally lower satisfaction and loyalty levels than clients of banks in Western Europe. Second, the recent banking crisis has affected the level of customer satisfaction much more strongly in developing European countries than in developed ones. Third, the recent banking crisis has changed the character of the process of building customer satisfaction and loyalty in Poland by strengthening the influence of the image area. Originality/value – Hardly anyone has tried to measure the influence of the banking crises at the level of customers’ satisfaction and the structure of the process of building long‐term relations between banks and their clients before.