Efficiency, Profitability and Quality of Banking Services

This paper develops a general framework for combining strategic benchmarking with efficiency benchmarking of the services offered by bank branches. In particular, the service-profit chain is cast as a cascade of efficiency benchmarking models. Three models-based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)-are developed in order to implement the framework in the practical setting of a bank's branches: an operational efficiency mode, a quality efficiency model and a profitability efficiency model. The use of the models is illustrated using data for the branches of a commercial Bank. Empirical results indicate that superior insights can be obtained by analyzing operations, service quality, and profitability simultaneously than the information obtained from benchmarking studies of these three dimensions separately. Some relations between operational efficiency and profitability, and between operational efficiency and service quality are investigated. This paper was presented at the Financial Institutions Center's conference on Performance of Financial Institutions, May 8-10, 1997.

Multicriterial ranking approach for evaluating bank branch performance

14 ranking methods based on multiple criteria are suggested for evaluating the performance of the bank branches. The methods are explained via an illustrative example, and some of them are applied to a real-life data for 23 retail bank branches in a large-scale private Turkish commercial bank

The future of small banks

This paper is a report to the Banking Supervision and Regulation Division on research that I conducted on the future of small banks while working in the Division as a Visiting Scholar. In this paper, small banks are identified as those with total assets less than $1 billion. Small banks have an important role in financing economic activity in the U.S., through their loans to small businesses. In addition, the Banking Supervision and Regulation Division of the St. Louis Fed has a vital interest in the future of small banks because most of the staff in this Division are involved in supervising small banks.Banks and banking ; Bank size

The effects of globalisation of financial services on banking industry and stock market: an Algerian case study

Since the mid-1980s, Algeria has embarked on a programme of comprehensive financial liberalisation to establish a market-oriented financial system, and to develop the role of the Algiers Stock Exchange in the mobilisation of financial resources. The transition from a centrally planned to a market-oriented economy meant fewer regulatory barriers towards local and foreign banks. This study demonstrates that financial liberalisation is the main force that drives the globalisation of financial services, followed by financial innovations and the Internet. Globalisation has affected the performance of the two prevalent banking models in Algeria: interest based (conventional) and non- interest-based (Islamic). The benchmarks used to assess banking performance are: competition, profitability and efficiency. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show a direct link between banking efficiency and the globalisation of financial services. The study concludes that globalisation has more advantages than disadvantages to the Algerian banking sector and the Algiers Stock Exchange. The elimination of regulatory barriers has enabled state-owned banks to improve the quality of their services and to use more advanced information technologies. Private and foreign banks are also involved in the modernisation of the Algerian banking industry by launching innovative financial products and attracting local and foreign capital. However, this project emphasises that the removal of remaining regulatory obstacles would enable banks to benefit fully from the process of financial liberalisation, and to be active institutions in the financial market. Moreover, opening the Algiers Stock Exchange to large domestic and foreign companies would attract capital investments and boost equity trading in Algeria

TOR: modular search with hookable disjunction

Horn Clause Programs have a natural exhaustive depth-first procedural semantics. However, for many programs this semantics is ineffective. In order to compute useful solutions, one needs the ability to modify the search method that explores the alternative execution branches. Tor, a well-defined hook into Prolog disjunction, provides this ability. It is light-weight thanks to its library approach and efficient because it is based on program transformation. Tor is general enough to mimic search-modifying predicates like ECLiPSe's search/6. Moreover, Tor supports modular composition of search methods and other hooks. The Tor library is already provided and used as an add-on to SWI-Prolog.publisher: Elsevier articletitle: Tor: Modular search with hookable disjunction journaltitle: Science of Computer Programming articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2013.05.008 content_type: article copyright: Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.status: publishe

Improving Service Performance in Banking using Quality Adjusted Data Envelopment Analysis

The goal of this research is to describe the application of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to the performance evaluations of bank branches. Special attention is focused on how to incorporate the quality dimension into branch efficiency. DEA will apply to a set of micro-data from a Czech commercial bank branch network. In the banking sector, providing services quality is one of the key focuses. Therefore, the quality dimension should be incorporated into the DEA model. The goal of the quality adjusted DEA model is to identify best practice branches that work efficiently and at the same time provide services with high quality. This model avoids productivity-quality tradeoff, which is present by the standard DEA model. The quality of services is measured by customer service, mystery shopping and calls, client information index, retention, and client product penetration. Main determinants of efficiency and quality level are branch size and region via purchasing power.quality adjusted DEA, branch performance, scale efficiency, return to scale

Memory bank predictors

Cache memories are commonly implemented through multiple memory banks to improve bandwidth and latency. The early knowledge of the data cache bank that an instruction will access can help to improve the performance in several ways. One scenario that is likely to become increasingly important is clustered microprocessors with a distributed cache. This work presents a study of different cache bank predictors. We show that effective bank predictors can be implemented with relatively low cost. For instance, a predictor of approximately 4 Kbytes is shown to achieve an average hit rate of 78% for SPECint2000 when used to predict accesses to an 8-bank cache memory in a contemporary superscalar processor. We also show how a predictor can be used to reduce the communication latency caused by memory accesses in a clustered microarchitecture with a distributed cache design.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Benchmarking financial development

Capitalizing on recent improvements in the availability of cross-country financial sector data, this paper proposes a standard methodology for benchmarking the policy component of financial development. Systematic controls are introduced to isolate main structural country characteristics and a principal components analysis is used to help identify a parsimonious set of ten"core"outcome indicators from a broader set of twenty seven potential indicators covering different dimensions of development in both financial institutions and financial markets. Such a broad-based approach helps reveal important determinants and regularities of the process of financial development. The paper also identifies some of the main data gaps that will need to be filled to allow further progress in financial benchmarking looking forward.Debt Markets,,Emerging Markets,Economic Theory&Research,Access to Finance

Disentangling Within- and Between-Country Efficiency Differences of Bank Branches

In this paper we propose a framework to assess the efficiency of bank branch networks operating in different financial environments. The framework can be used to disentangle within- from between-country performance differences. The framework is constructive in that it identifies operational aspects responsible for superior performance and suggests guidelines for branch improvement. We report results from three bank branch networks in the U.K., Greece and Cyprus, and demonstrate how branch networks can benefit from such international comparisons.Bank Branch Efficiency, International Benchmarks, Data Envelopment Analysis.