The changing landscape of retail banking and the future of digital banking

The emergence of new technologies and players, along with a favorable regulatory framework (PSD2 Directive) are changing the European banking industry, in particular. New services and new customer’s experiences are also changing the way individuals interact to satisfy their financial needs. The financial services industry is experiencing new and different business value propositions that are innovating products, processes and accesses. Value chains are also undertaking a significant shift from a pipeline, vertical paradigm, to open banking business models where open innovation, modularity and ecosystems are going to drive the ways banks will improve their cost efficiency as well as develop new business paradigms. “Partnering on order” might be the way to lead the future of the industry. As a result of these changes, also new challenges are rising in the market

Commercial pressures and social justice in the Indian textile and garment industries: rules, conventions, commitments and change

This thesis explores the tensions that arise when business enterprises respond to situations that have both commercial aspects and implications for workers. Using Grounded Theory methodology it examines data from 56 case profiles, extensive interviews and secondary sources in order to understand the nature and variety of the social and commercial commitments that enterprises in the Indian textile and garment industries make and how these are influenced by the rules and conventions inherent in global value chains and in the local culture. It uses concepts drawn from Convention Theory, from social realism and from the social justice literature to develop an analytical framework that explains how priorities are coordinated in three arenas – within enterprises, in interactions connected with the workplace and in society as a whole. The findings show that, in the mainstream, social commitments are generally weak and behaviour towards workers is inconsistent, reflecting a reactive stance that ethical trading has done little to change. Most social enterprises have similarly weak commercial commitments and efforts by Fair Trade organisations to reach mainstream markets have proved problematic. Few examples have been found of commercial success achieved in a way that also meets the criteria of social justice. Those cases that have come closest have created new business models that integrate social and commercial values, forged by means of long-term business relationships or partnerships. A variety of mutually-reinforcing factors combine to determine the balance of priorities – public discourse, engagement by stakeholders, including workers, and internal processes for resolving differences – and these are affected by the level of scrutiny and openness to organisational learning. Interventions aimed at greater social justice in the industry or at scaling up social enterprise need to recognise the complexity of these interrelationships and the ways in which rules, conventions and commitments blend to determine behaviour

Improving water asset management when data are sparse

Ensuring the high of assets in water utilities is critically important and requires continuous improvement. This is due to the need to minimise risk of harm to human health and the environment from contaminated drinking water. Continuous improvement and innovation in water asset management are therefore, necessary and are driven by (i) increased regulatory requirements on serviceability; (ii) high maintenance costs, (iii) higher customer expectations, and (iv) enhanced environmental and health/safety requirements. High quality data on asset failures, maintenance, and operations are key requirements for developing reliability models. However, a literature search revealed that, in practice, there is sometimes limited data in water utilities - particularly for over-ground assets. Perhaps surprisingly, there is often a mismatch between the ambitions of sophisticated reliability tools and the availability of asset data water utilities are able to draw upon to implement them in practice. This research provides models to support decision-making in water utility asset management when there is limited data. Three approaches for assessing asset condition, maintenance effectiveness and selecting maintenance regimes for specific asset groups were developed. Expert elicitation was used to test and apply the developed decision-support tools. A major regional water utility in England was used as a case study to investigate and test the developed approaches. The new approach achieved improved precision in asset condition assessment (Figure 3–3a) - supporting the requirements of the UK Capital Maintenance Planning Common Framework. Critically, the thesis demonstrated that, on occasion, assets were sometimes misallocated by more than 50% between condition grades when using current approaches. Expert opinions were also sought for assessing maintenance effectiveness, and a new approach was tested with over-ground assets. The new approach’s value was demonstrated by the capability to account for finer measurements (as low as 10%) of maintenance effectiveness (Table 4-4). An asset maintenance regime selection approach was developed to support decision-making when data are sparse. The value of the approach is its versatility in selecting different regimes for different asset groups, and specifically accounting for the assets unique performance variables

Respiratory Therapy Staff Retention: A Systems Thinking Approach

Respiratory therapists are an integral part of the healthcare workforce in the United States. The healthcare workforce shortage accelerated by the COVID global pandemic has impacted respiratory therapy departments across the nation, with organizations struggling to hire and retain staff. The prevailing approaches in combating this is linear in nature and does not consider the complexity of the system. The purpose of this dissertation is to address retention issues in respiratory therapy departments from a systems thinking approach and to develop a prototype utilizing systems thinking methodologies and tools

The governmentality of corporate (un)sustainability: the case of the ILVA steel plant in Taranto (Italy)

The present research aims to investigate the role of states in governing the sustain- ability trajectories and decisions of companies and their local communities. Draw- ing on Dean’s (Governmentality: power and rule in modern society, SAGE, London, 2009) “analytics of government” as the theoretical framework, the paper focuses on detecting how the Italian Government “problematised” the sustainability-related risks associated with the ILVA steel plant in Taranto, whose levels of pollution have worried both the Italian authorities and the European Union Commission. The anal- ysis also considers the “regimes of governance” under which the risks have been addressed and then explains the “utopian ideal” that the Italian Government tried to achieve by allowing the company to continue its activity, contrary to the Italian Judiciary’s provision to halt the hot working area of the steel plant in July 2012. Patterns related to Dean’s framework were identi ed through an iterative process of manual elaborative coding of the o cial documents ascribable to the main actors involved in governing the sustainability-related risks at ILVA. The ndings show that the Italian Government took its decisions on ILVA in the name of relevant risks of unemployment, economic development and territorial competitiveness. The Ital- ian Government adopted several practices of governance to make these risks more “visible” and to silence the environmental and health risks that, otherwise, would have emphasised the unsustainability of the business activities. The paper extends the growing body of research that investigates corporate (un)sustainability practices by showing how states may directly in uence sustainability-related corporate risks in the name of a higher public interest

Rethinking the risk matrix

So far risk has been mostly defined as the expected value of a loss, mathematically PL (being P the probability of an adverse event and L the loss incurred as a consequence of the adverse event). The so called risk matrix follows from such definition. This definition of risk is justified in a long term “managerial” perspective, in which it is conceivable to distribute the effects of an adverse event on a large number of subjects or a large number of recurrences. In other words, this definition is mostly justified on frequentist terms. Moreover, according to this definition, in two extreme situations (high-probability/low-consequence and low-probability/high-consequence), the estimated risk is low. This logic is against the principles of sustainability and continuous improvement, which should impose instead both a continuous search for lower probabilities of adverse events (higher and higher reliability) and a continuous search for lower impact of adverse events (in accordance with the fail-safe principle). In this work a different definition of risk is proposed, which stems from the idea of safeguard: (1Risk)=(1P)(1L). According to this definition, the risk levels can be considered low only when both the probability of the adverse event and the loss are small. Such perspective, in which the calculation of safeguard is privileged to the calculation of risk, would possibly avoid exposing the Society to catastrophic consequences, sometimes due to wrong or oversimplified use of probabilistic models. Therefore, it can be seen as the citizen’s perspective to the definition of risk