Corportate strategy, centralisation and outsourcing in banking: case studies on paper payment processing

This is an empirical review of IT outsourcing as an emerging tool for corporate strategy after deregulation and other phenomena changed the suitability of the global/universal bank model. Case studies of UK commercial banks are used to focus on cost management of paper and electronic processing through insourcing and outsourcing arrangements to change the size/efficiency equation in banking. The analysis discusses the corporate strategy and corr capabilities ussues behind a number of innovations and illustrates how outsourcing and other third party arrangements alters strategic balance albeit as a component of overall strategy. The paper establishes why outsourcing decisions have been concentrated in particular aspects of banking and discusses the competitive and environmental forces which have contributed to this focus.

How bank branches affect customer service quality perceptions.

The Australian banking industry has changed significantly with the introduction of electronic banking technology. This has led to a situation where facilities such as ATM machines and Internet Banking have become increasingly important in the service delivery process. Traditionally, there has been relatively little research into the role facilities play in service satisfaction. There is also little literature about how customers interact with service facilities. This has left banks grappling with facility design and planning issues. This article examines how Australian bank customers interact with local banking facilities by investigating five aspects of the service facility: Access, Atmospherics, Waiting Time, Technology, and Security. Findings suggest that facilities have a significant impact on customer satisfaction levels. Convenient and easy access, security, and a comfortable level of technology were identified by customers as the most important factors influencing their satisfaction levels.<br /

Knowledge-based design support and inductive learning

Designing and learning are closely related activities in that design as an ill-structure problem involves identifying the problem of the design as well as finding its solutions. A knowledge-based design support system should support learning by capturing and reusing design knowledge. This thesis addresses two fundamental problems in computational support to design activities: the development of an intelligent design support system architecture and the integration of inductive learning techniques in this architecture.This research is motivated by the belief that (1) the early stage of the design process can be modelled as an incremental learning process in which the structure of a design problem or the product data model of an artefact is developed using inductive learning techniques, and (2) the capability of a knowledge-based design support system can be enhanced by accumulating and storing reusable design product and process information.In order to incorporate inductive learning techniques into a knowledge-based design model and an integrated knowledge-based design support system architecture, the computational techniques for developing a knowledge-based design support system architecture and the role of inductive learning in Al-based design are investigated. This investigation gives a background to the development of an incremental learning model for design suitable for a class of design tasks whose structures are not well known initially.This incremental learning model for design is used as a basis to develop a knowledge-based design support system architecture that can be used as a kernel for knowledge-based design applications. This architecture integrates a number of computational techniques to support the representation and reasoning of design knowledge. In particular, it integrates a blackboard control system with an assumption-based truth maintenance system in an object-oriented environment to support the exploration of multiple design solutions by supporting the exploration and management of design contexts.As an integral part of this knowledge-based design support architecture, a design concept learning system utilising a number of unsupervised inductive learning techniques is developed. This design concept learning system combines concept formation techniques with design heuristics as background knowledge to build a design concept tree from raw data or past design examples. The design concept tree is used as a conceptual structure for the exploration of new designs.The effectiveness of this knowledge-based design support architecture and the design concept learning system is demonstrated through a realistic design domain, the design of small-molecule drugs one of the key tasks of which is to identify a pharmacophore description (the structure of a design problem) from known molecule examples.In this thesis, knowledge-based design and inductive learning techniques are first reviewed. Based on this review, an incremental learning model and an integrated architecture for intelligent design support are presented. The implementation of this architecture and a design concept learning system is then described. The application of the architecture and the design concept learning system in the domain of small-molecule drug design is then discussed. The evaluation of the architecture and the design concept learning system within and beyond this particular domain, and future research directions are finally discussed

ATMS-Based architecture for stylistics-aware text generation

This thesis is concerned with the effect of surface stylistic constraints (SSC) on syntactic and lexical choice within a unified generation architecture. Despite the fact that these issues have been investigated by researchers in the field, little work has been done with regard to system architectures that allow surface form constraints to influence earlier linguistic or even semantic decisions made throughout the NLG process. By SSC we mean those stylistic requirements that are known beforehand but cannot be tested until after the utterance or — in some lucky cases — until a proper linearised part of it has been generated. These include collocational constraints, text size limits, and poetic aspects such as rhyme and metre to name a few. This thesis introduces a new NLG architecture that can be sensitive to surface stylistic requirements. It brings together a well-founded linguistic theory that has been used in many successful NLG systems (Systemic Functional Linguistics, SFL) and an exist¬ ing AI search mechanism (the Assumption-based Truth Maintenance System, ATMS) which caches important search information and avoids work duplication. To this end, the thesis explores the logical relation between the grammar formalism and the search technique. It designs, based on that logical connection, an algorithm for the automatic translation of systemic grammar networks to ATMS dependency networks. The generator then uses the translated networks to generate natural language texts with a high paraphrasing power as a direct result of its ability to pursue multiple paths simultaneously. The thesis approaches the crucial notion of choice differently to previ¬ ous systems using SFL. It relaxes the choice process in that choosers are not obliged to deterministically choose a single alternative allowing SSC to influence the final lexical and syntactic decisions. The thesis also develops a situation-action framework for the specification of stylistic requirements independently of the micro-semantic input. The user or application can state what surface requirements they wish to impose and the ATMS-based generator then attempts to satisfy these constraints. Finally, a prototype ATMS-based generation system embodying the ideas presented in this thesis is implemented and evaluated. We examine the system's stylistic sensitivity by testing it on three different sets of stylistic requirements, namely: collocational, size, and poetic constraints

The service elimination process : an empirical investigation into the British financial services sector

The present study represents an in-depth empirical investigation into the service elimination process in the British financial services sector. It aims to make a contribution towards the concise development of the literature on service elimination and to provide empirically based recommendations, which can improve the way financial service elimination is practised. The theoretical part of the study focused first on a review of the characteristics of services in general and of financial services in particular and of the service range management activities of financial institutions. Second, the literature on product and service elimination was reviewed. The bulk of this material refers to conceptual propositions and empirical evidence on elimination from manufacturing settings, while conceptual and empirical material from service and financial service settings is alarmingly sparse. The presents tudy conceptualisedth e service elimination process as consisting of three broad stages, a) the pre-elimination stage, b) the actual service elimination decision-making process and c) the post-elimination stage. The study adopted a research approach based on the broad hypothesis that service elimination decisions are not made in a vacuum (as the limited literature on service and financial service elimination assumes explicitly or implicitly) but that they are influenced by contextual organisational and environmental characteristics of companies. Based on the above conceptualisations, the research objectives were to a) identify the content of the service elimination process (i. e., the decision variables involved in the various steps of the process) b) measure the relative importance/frequency of use of the above content and c) measure the influence of a set of contextual independent variables on the relative importance/frequency of use of the content of the service elimination process. To meet the above research objectives, a pluralistic research method was adopted. For the identification component of the research objectives qualitative research (in-depth interviews) was conducted, while for the measurement component quantitative research was conducted(mail survey). The findings indicated that service elimination decisions were the outcome of a multi-step process, which with very few exceptions (i. e., the way in which British financial institutions identified financial services as candidates for elimination) was found to be largely informal and unsophisticated. Moreover service elimination was rated as the least important service range management activity and was allocated the least amount of resources (temporal, monetary and human). The findings also suggested that the content of the service elimination process was both similar and different to elimination practice in manufacturing settings. Among the most obvious similarities was the paramount importance of sales and profitability considerations in making products and financial services candidates for elimination. Among the most striking differences was that while a product is fully eliminated, partial elimination was the predominant outcome of the service elimination process in the studied setting. With regards to the contextual influence, it was found that the relative importance/frequency of the decision variables involved in the service elimination process varied in relation to the type and the size of individual financial institutions, the pursued overall business strategy, and degree of market orientation, the degree of formalisation of the service elimination process, the number of services in the range (service diversity), the type of financial service which is considered for elimination, the method of its delivery process, the intensity of competition and of the legislative environment and the volatility of the technological environment. As such, the findings confirmed the hypothesised dynamism of the service elimination decisions and suggested that any attempt to describe the service elimination process in a golden rule way that fits all companies, all financial services and all environmental circumstances would be misleading

Banking on Indigenous communities: Issues, options, and Australian and international best practice

The ability of people to manage and budget their incomes, arrange to pay third parties, purchase food, goods and services, and maintain a level of financial and economic independence and planning, all rely on maintaining informed access to appropriate banking and financial services. The rhetoric of economic independence is commonly employed as a laudable objective for Indigenous peoples. However, there is little evidence of systematic attention being applied to ensuring Indigenous Australians can even enjoy equitable levels of access to those essential banking and financial services that are taken for granted by other Australians (Reconciliation Australia Strategic Plan 2001–2003)

Total factor productivity growth and its decomposition : an assessment of the Indian banking sector in the 'true' liberalised era

Assessments of the performance of Indian commercial banks are not new in the literature. However, most of the earlier studies consider relatively partial measures such as technical efficiency of the banks in assessing their performance. We have considered overall (Malmquist) total factor productivity improvement achieved by 68 Indian commercial banks from 1998-99 to 2006-07, the true liberalised era in some senses, and decomposed it into the three of its economically meaningful components, namely technical change, technical efficiency change and scale (efficiency) change factor using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology. Our results suggest that public-sector banks are, on an average, adjusting themselves to the changing environment better and improving their performance relative to their counterparts under private and foreign ownership. The latter were widely believed to do better under the new regime because of their relatively more flexible operating systems as well as better market orientation. This finding clearly has important policy implications in determining the government’s attitude towards overall market-orientation of the Indian banking sector. To be specific, the government should more cautiously approach liberalising the banking sector and should not blindly invite more foreign players to it. The lesson becomes particularly more relevant at a time when we are witnessing a severe global crisis which, although began with the bursting of the US housing market bubble, gathered momentum from a series of bankruptcies of the so-called “too big to fail” banks with Lehman Brothers in the lead. JEL Classification: C43, D24, G28 Key Words: Total Factor Productivity; Technical Change; Technical Efficiency Change; Scale (Efficiency) Change Factor; Data Envelopment Analysis; Liberalisatio

Impact of Financial Liberalisation and Deregulation on Banking Sector in Pakistan

The study analyses market perception about the performance of Pakistani commercial banks due to financial liberalisation and deregulation measures taken by the central bank over the last two decades. For this purpose, it uses Survey approach. To augment the results of Survey Based Approach, it employs Distribution Free Approach to measure relative cost inefficiencies of commercial banks. Out of 35 commercial banks, 15 banks have been chosen for analysis purpose. Key banking reforms remain helpful in correcting flaws in the banking sector of Pakistan. In particular, privatisation of banks, the deregulation and institutional strengthening measures and switching towards market-based monetary and credit management remain helpful in correcting the prevailing flaws. The cost inefficiency scores of banks also indicate that the efficiency of Pakistani banks have improved during 1990 to 2006. As regards group-wise efficiency estimates, foreign banks are found to be more efficient, followed by private banks, nationalised commercial banks, and privatised banks. The relative high cost inefficiency of privatised banks is most probably due to having remained under state owned structure during most of the period of the study. The financial liberalisation and the resultant competitive environment might be the key factors behind improvements in efficacy of banks.Banking, Efficiency, Regulations, Financial Reforms