Public trust in bullion banking services and community financial inclusion: A topic modeling and sentiment analysis of the TRING application

Immanuel Nicholas Fransepta Samosir (Statistics of Pematangsiantar City, Pematangsiantar, North Sumatra 21100)

Community Service For Sustainable Community Journal
Vol. 3 No. 1: (February) 2026

Background: Public trust is critical to the adoption of digital financial services, particularly among low-income households and micro-entrepreneurs. Indonesia’s introduction of bullion banking services in 2025 through Pegadaian and its TRING application provides a relevant context for examining community financial inclusion and grassroots economic empowerment. This study investigates public trust in TRING by analyzing user-generated reviews as a bottom-up indicator of community experience. Methods: A quantitative text-mining approach was applied to 2,000 Google Play reviews collected from 16 December 2025 to 11 January 2026. The analysis included Indonesian-language preprocessing, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), Indonesian RoBERTa sentiment classification, Welch’s t-test, temporal analysis, and comparison of five machine-learning classifiers. Model performance was assessed using standard metrics and 95% confidence intervals. Findings: Five dominant topics were identified: usability, transaction reliability, customer service, gold investment features, and security/trust. Overall, 60.05% of reviews were positive and 39.95% negative. Security, verification, and access issues were prominent in one-star reviews, while usability was more evident in five-star reviews. Negative reviews were more than twice as long as positive reviews. Random Forest achieved 93.5% accuracy (95% CI: 90.6–95.5%), with no meaningful performance difference among the evaluated classifiers. Conclusion: Public trust in digital bullion banking is conditional on users’ service experiences, particularly accessibility, verification, security, and usability. Assisted onboarding and community-based digital and financial literacy initiatives can help strengthen inclusive financial services. Novelty/Originality of this article: This study uses app-store reviews as a bottom-up indicator of community trust in inclusive financial infrastructure and provides early empirical evidence on user experiences with Indonesia’s emerging bullion banking services during digital service migration, linking computational text analysis with community financial inclusion and grassroots economic empowerment.