Objectives and Hypotheses

Resulting from literary review, the research starts from the hypothesis that Spanish bank customers maintain a high degree of loyalty to the institutions with which they have contracted the services of credit and savings both because of convenience and habit and because of satisfaction and confi­dence with the service received (Santiago, 2008).

In this regard, the issue to explain is the risk of desertion or abandonment of a client in a finan­cial institution, which can be understood as the customer leaving or behaviour change (Malhotra et al., 2008). On the other hand, Garland (2002) defines it as the abandonment of the customer of a product or service for another one, while Crie (2003) believes that attrition is both active and destructive response to dissatisfaction and that is reflected in the break-up of the relationship with the brand, product or supplier. We agree with Stewart (1998) when he defined desertion as the end of the relationship between the customer and the bank.

There are previous studies that have analyzed the issue of bank desertion. Some authors see it as a customer complaint about the financial institu­tion (Crie, 2003), but they limit their analysis to a broader sense of the term. A complementary theory assumes that customers who complain about their dissatisfaction have the opportunity to leave or remain regular customers of the financial institution (Sheth et al., 1999; Arnould, 2004).

In our research we take into account a stricter theory about this concept, proposing a series of hypotheses in relation to the concept of aban­donment of a financial institution for reasons of financial dissatisfaction and disloyalty. These are:

H1: There is a meaningful relationship between e-banking customer classification according to connection with the financial institution regarding turnover and customer desertion. H2: There is a statistically significant relationship between the abandonment of an e-banking customer and two products linked with the financial institution, such as hiring or not, at least, one credit card and debit card numbers contracted with the institution.

H3: There is a relevant relationship between cus­tomer satisfaction and confidence manifested in several items recorded in a survey of overall satisfaction, and customer abandon­ment or desertion.

H4: The impact of qualitative variables concern­ing confidence and overall satisfaction in the study of bank loyalty is greater than the quantitative and qualitative variables assessed by the financial institution.