Abstract
Customer loyalty in digital payments is increasingly determined after adoption, when users evaluate whether the service consistently delivers expected performance, convenience, security and dependable relationship support. This study examines how payment experience translates into customer loyalty toward Mastercard-enabled services in Bangladesh using the expectation-confirmation model (ECM) and relationship-marketing logic. A cross-sectional survey dataset containing 400 numbered questionnaire records was audited; 385 complete responses were available for analysis. The focal model isolates Relative Advantage, Performance Expectancy, Transaction Security and Trust as experience antecedents, followed by Satisfaction, Relationship Quality and Customer Loyalty. This design is intentionally distinct from other payment-adoption research because it models loyalty as a post-use relational outcome rather than focusing primarily on security, awareness or sustainability. Descriptively, Performance Expectancy had the highest construct mean (M=4.05), followed by Relative Advantage (M=3.98) and Satisfaction (M=3.93). In multivariable regression, the experience block explained 21.1% of loyalty variance; adding Satisfaction increased R² to 23.8%, and adding Relationship Quality increased it to 24.7%. Performance Expectancy was the strongest standardized predictor of loyalty (β=.207, p<.001), followed by Relative Advantage (β=.179, p<.001) and Satisfaction (β=.164, p<.001). Bootstrap diagnostics indicated small but positive sequential indirect effects through Satisfaction and Relationship Quality. However, internal-consistency coefficients for the three-item scales were below conventional confirmatory thresholds (α=.375-.512). Accordingly, the substantive findings should be treated as exploratory evidence and not as a fully validated confirmatory SEM result. The paper outlines a measurement-refinement agenda and managerial implications for experience design, service recovery and loyalty formation in Bangladesh's AI-enabled payment ecosystem.