Technology Leadership, Brand Equity, and Customer Loyalty towards Fintech Service Providers in China Completed Research

China claims the world's largest mobile payments market and serves as the global benchmark for other markets to pursue. As the battle over the Chinese mobile wallet market wages on, the gap between leading players WeChat Pay (owned by Tencent) and Alipay remains narrow. Based on brand equity theory and symbolic value theory, a research model is proposed to investigate the relationship between Fintech's technology leadership, brand equity, and customer loyalty. The results show that Alipay provides more innovative and diversified financial services and outperforms WeChat Pay in technology leadership. The study confirms that technology leadership positively affects brand equity, which in turn positively affects customer loyalty. The boundary condition for different type of customers is considered and implications for theory and practice are also discussed.