267,183 research outputs found
Retailing Strategy and the Importance of Clearly Defined Partnership Arrangements
Retailers operate in a complex and competitive environment, and because of this retail managers need to be aware of the need to seek market opportunities and develop long-term sustainable relationships with partner organizations. In order that a retail organization develops a sustainable competitive advantage, it is essential that a partnership arrangement is viewed as necessary and is based on trust. This means that there is a high degree of transparency and that open communication is encouraged. It also means that various types of information are shared and staff involved in the partnership arrangement are committed to personal development. This is necessary if an organizational cultural value system is to be produced that gives rise to a set of common goals and objectives that translate into a highly motivated workforce. Should this be the case, staff in the partnership arrangement should be able to provide a high level of customer service that results in customer expectations being met. Retail managers and their staff are required to be committed to market intelligence gathering and to think in terms of strategic positioning. The governance mechanism can be used as a blueprint to provide retail staff with direction, and it should ensure that open, mutually beneficial partnership arrangements develop that can be maintained through time
Competition in financial services
In the financial services sector, the failure of a single institution can have a compounding effect on the sector, and on national and global economies. In particular, there is systemic risk from inter-institution lending, and this effect is more complex in Australia due to the small number of major players.
In retail banking in Australia, following a similar practice in most developed countries, if an unsecured creditor is a retail depositor, their deposit is insured by the government. That is, if a retail bank fails, the Federal Government will make the depositors whole.
The regulatory system, particularly the prudential regulatory system, is designed to protect depositors’ and borrowers’ interests, and this protects the interest of the government. The effect is that regulatory policy on banking has prioritised stability in consideration of the sovereign risk associated with the risk of retail bank failure.
However, this approach also creates a policy dilemma. The dilemma concerns the extent to which the retail banking sector can attain the benefits of the vigorous rivalry from effective and efficient competition, without unduly risking stability and the potential of a devastating call on the public purse.
Specifically, in the context of effective and efficient competition, there is limited competitiveness in retail banking in Australia. This is reflected in the static state of market share between the four major banks, and very slow and marginal improvements gains even by strong second tier competitors. Furthermore, the retail banking sector’s capacity for product and service innovation is limited.
Although the absence of vigorous rivalry is conducive to stability within the retail banking sector, it is likely to detract from the welfare of retail banking consumers. Furthermore, the level of innovation may not be as high as is feasible and barriers, including prudential regulatory barriers to entry or expansion, mean that the extent of rivalry is unlikely to change without some form of promotion of competition.
The paper consequently makes a four-point recommendation for the removal of the ‘four pillars’ policy:
The four major banks are protected by an implicit government guarantee that impacts market operation with little observable benefit to consumers, and may be a source of consumer disutility.
The four pillars policy has prompted increased vertical integration within the sector, particularly in the area of mortgage products.
There are sufficient merger protections provided by Part IV of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth).
Competition and contestability arise when there are reasonably low barriers to entry and exit from the sector. It is not clear that low barriers to entry exist in Australia, and evidence to support this view comes from the failure of international banks to gain a significant toehold in the retail banking sector in Australia. One deterrent to entry is the regulatory focus on the four pillars.
The authors recognise that this position is at odds with the view of the Financial System Inquiry. However, the rationale in the report of the Inquiry was to prevent mergers, and the current competition law achieves this objective.
The paper recommends two specific policies to promote competition in retail banking without the structural intervention that would otherwise be required to improve the intensity of competition in the retail banking sector:
Introduce bank account number portability. This would use ‘know your customer’ and central database systems in a similar form to those that have been used for mobile number portability in Australia for the last decade and a half.
Introduce customer access to data held by banks to allow third parties to compare bank offerings across all banks.
Significantly, these two recommendations are consistent with the productivity proposals issued by the UK Government in July 2015.
The research paper also examines crowd equity funding as a disruptive force in the banking sector, and recommends that crowd equity funding be permitted with the following safeguards:
ASIC should take an active role in monitoring crowd equity funding and be willing to sue in case of fraudulent action.
Any intermediary online platform should have a financial services licence with limited duty of care.
There should be a cap for business raisings through crowd equity funding of $2 million in a 12-month period.
Crowd equity funding is a social phenomenon. Through its use of social media, it has attracted people who have previously never been interested in investing in companies. Instead of being feared, this interest should be nurtured through the promotion of investors’ financial education
The significance of logistics in servicing growing volumes of e-commerce
Purpose: The article highlights the multi-task nature and prospects of the development of the transit potential of warehouse logistics systems, reveals the theoretical and methodological foundations of logistics in the storage and cargo handling system, indicates and confirms the importance of warehousing logistics in the context of servicing the growing volumes of electronic commerce.
Design/Methodology/Approach: For the purposes of developing logistics in the storage and cargo handling system we study the technical and technological support and design developments that have significant potential for increasing the efficiency of logistics processes, and to study consumer behavior in the warehouse services market and transport market trends - warehouse activities.
Findings: Automation significantly simplifies logistics processes, information exchange, remote control and management, optimizes costs by combining various market entities and objects, target groups and parameters of logistics processes on electronic platforms. Integration in modern logistics allows synchronizing the complex information component of electronic services and platforms and activating the formation of a system interface that is common for all elements of the logistics system of warehousing, cargo processing and inventory management.
Practical implications: The results of the study can be implemented in the activities of Russian companies in order to develop the transit potential of warehouse logistics systems.
Originality/value: The significance of this study lies in shifting the emphasis to the need to switch to improved customer service systems taking into account the needs and development of online retail and fulfillment of logistics operators (full-cycle operator: taking goods from the customer’s warehouse, responsible storage, packaging, delivery, work with returns), tied to the development of infrastructure, as the foundation for increasing the efficiency, speed and quality of logistics processes.peer-reviewe
Optimal Planning and Operational Management of Open-Market Community Microgrids
In this article, a new business model comprising multiple stakeholders is proposed to develop a frame for future flexible retail energy market in community microgrids. The microgrid comprises multiple and different distributed energy resources (DERs) such as renewable generation units, battery energy storage systems (BESSs), and micro diesel engines (MDE), to minimize daily operational costs of the system. To solve the defined complex optimization model, some operational strategies are proposed and then genetic algorithm is adopted to determine the hourly optimal power dispatch. The case study shows that the proposed model minimizes the daily operating cost of the community system effectively
Design Dynamics. Navigating the new Complex Landscape of Omnichannel Fashion Retail
The fashion industry is entering the dynamic global competitive market, promoting various actions prioritising design, creativity, sustainability, and technological advancement as pivotal factors. At the same time, it is reimagining its business models to adapt to the changing landscape. The rise of pervasive connectivity, intuitive interfaces and innovative interaction channels has triggered a revolution in fashion retail, reshaping customer behaviour and expectations. The traditional retail framework has evolved into a fully interconnected omnichannel system. This transformation is characterised by the proliferation of physical and virtual channels and touch points and by the adoption of a more flexible and integrated approach.
In this dynamic context, design plays a central role, possessing the ability to impart meaning to the production and distribution system. Design-led innovation represents an incremental form of innovation that injects a nuanced range of meaning into the marketplace, extending beyond tangible objects, including discourses, expressions, narratives, visual images, symbols, metaphors, and spaces.
The book analyses the multifaceted nature of the fashion retail experience through the lens of the design discipline, aiming to contextualise the evolution of retail within increasingly complex processes, networks and interconnections, both theoretically and practically. The focus is on retail design, delving into the new skills required and the valuable tools needed to apply them in inherently multidisciplinary contexts. Ultimately, the aim is to navigate the intricate terrain of retail evolution and shed light on the evolving role of design in this multifaceted sector
The Internet and the Future of Financial Services: Transparency, Differential Pricing and Disintermediation
The Internet has had a profound effect on the financial service sector, dramatically changing the cost and capabilities for marketing, distributing and servicing financial products and enabling new types of products and services to be developed. This is especially true for retail financial services where widespread adoption of the Internet, the standardization provided by the world-wide web, and the low cost of Internet communications and transactions have made it possible to reach customers electronically in ways that were prohibitively costly even 5 years ago; indeed, pre-Internet attempts at the online distribution of retail financial services were outright failures in the mid-1980s. The concurrent growth and de-facto standardization of Internet-enabled personal financial management software (e.g., Quicken and Microsoft Money) have also contributed to an increasing array of low cost and potentially richer ways to provide information and transaction services to customers. The growth in Internet-enabled products and service has been rapid in some sectors and slower in others. Retail brokerage has seen a dramatic change with more than 15% (Salomon Smith Barney, 2000) of brokerage assets now managed in on-line trading counts, and substantially more if "traditional" brokerage accounts and mutual funds with on-line access are included. Similarly, approximately 10 million US customers currently use on-line banking (O'Brien, 2000) and 39 of the top 100 banks offer fully functional internet banking (ePayNews, 2000). Many banks and brokerages are on their second or third release of their on-line delivery platform. Credit cards, while not radically transformed in operational aspects of the business, have begun to have some volume of new origination on-line. In addition, leading credit card companies such as Capital One Financial have been some of the largest "traditional" companies in the use of Internet advertising (see www.adrelevance.com, 1999). More regulated and complex financial products such as mortgages and insurance have had some origination volume on the Internet (an estimated 400mm in insurance premiums will be sold online in 2000). For these sectors, the adoption of on-line origination has been much slower and concentrated in entrants, rather than incumbent firms. However, despite the small level of originations, the Internet has become a significant and growing source of product information - it is estimated that about 10% of insurance customers and 15% of mortgage customers have used the internet to shop for these products (Forrester, 1998; McVey, 2000). This may ultimately affect product purchase and pricing structure, irrespective of the delivery channel. Internet companies have also played a role in many other segments of the industry such as financial information and news, rating and comparison services, and even some areas where one might think the Internet would have a less significant role, such as financial planning and investment banking. While the continued growth rates are uncertain and the penetration for the more complex products has not yet been shown to be widespread, it is safe to conclude that the Internet will play a significant role in consumer financial services for a large subset of customers, and that this role will be significantly different across different sub-sectors of the financial industry. In discussions of the Internet impact on the financial services sector, the emphasis has often been placed on the direct cost-saving effects of using the Internet to provide transaction services. These potential cost savings are indeed significant and in the long term may lead to significant creation of value. However, there also substantial barriers to realizing much of this value. In some industries, such as the credit card industry, many of the potential gains from automation have already been realized, and in others, the gains may be concentrated in only a few areas of the value chain. For products which are sold through branches or agents (banking, mortgage and insurance), realization of cost savings will require a difficult and time consuming redesign of the retail delivery system. Finally, many of these efficiencies are accompanied by improved customer convenience. To the extent that consumers respond by consuming more services, particularly those that generate costs but not revenue, overall costs may not be substantially reduced. This has been the experience of previous innovations in retail financial service delivery such as automated teller machines (ATMs). Computers, and more recently the Internet, are best described as "general purpose technologies" (Brynjolfsson and Hitt, 2000), like the electric motor or the telegraph (Bresnehan and Trajtenberg, 1995). For general purpose technologies, most of the economic value they create is associated with their ability to enable complementary innovations in organization, market structure, and products and services. However, at the same time, these complementary changes are often disruptive to the existing structure of an industry (Tushman and Anderson, 1986; Bower and Christensen, 1995), leading to significant redistribution of value among industry participants and between producers and consumers. To understand the true impact of the Internet on the financial service industry, it is therefore necessary to identify how the Internet affects the critical drivers of industry structure, and how it enables or necessitates changes in products and services. This will necessarily be difficult, as it is hard to isolate the contribution of the Internet separately from the effects of other complementary innovations, and to distinguish Internet effects from other of long-term industry trends and exogenous factors. While obtaining precise numerical estimates of the productivity effects will be hard, in many cases the direction and general magnitude of the impact on productivity, profitability and consumer surplus (consumer value) will be clear. We see three principal issues that will determine the transformation of retail financial services: Transparency, or the ability of all market participants to determine the available range of prices for financial instruments and financial services; Differential pricing, in which finer and finer distinctions must be made among groups of customers, setting their prices based upon the revenue streams they generate, the costs to serve them, and their resulting profitability; Disintermediation or bypass, in which net-based direct interaction eliminates the role previously enjoyed by financial advisors, retail stock brokers, and insurance agents. Each of these will affect the roles to be played by financial service providers, the sources of profits available to them, and the strategies they may choose to pursue in order to earn those profits. However, different financial products will be affected differently by each of these issues in both the nature and the magnitude of the effect. In addition, these factors are often interdependent - for example, differential pricing is often a necessary response to increasing price transparency to prevent erosion of margins, and the ability to deliver sophisticated (although typically not complex) pricing strategies to customers may be affected by the incentives and structure of the distribution system. For these reasons, we will organize the remainder of the paper around the discussion of these effects as they apply within different sectors in financial services. The emphasis of our analysis will be on the primary sectors in retail financial services: credit cards, deposit banking, mortgages, brokerage, and insurance. Our focus is the retail segment because it has been the most radically transformed by the Internet to date, primarily because the retail business has the most to benefit from the reduction in customer interaction costs, the ability to reach mass markets, and the reduction in the role of geography in determining the strategies of financial services providers. Much of the computing- and communications-enabled transformation in the relationships among financial institutions or between financial institutions and consumers of wholesale financial services (for example, brokerage houses and exchanges, or large firms and their commercial lenders) have already occurred or were well underway before the Internet was commercialized. For these markets, the economics of computing and networking were still favorable under previous generations of technology. Many of the commercial financial services that are likely to be transformed by the Internet, at least in the medium term (3-5 years), are those that closely resemble retail services (such as commercial mortgage, short term lending, leasing, cash management, and the like). That is not to say that business to business (B2B) e-commerce opportunities do not exist in the financial sector - only that many of the medium term opportunities that are directly a result of the Internet are closely analogous to changes in the retail sector, and the others are probably more closely related to organizational and market innovation rather than a result of ubiquitous and low-cost communications technology.
Identification of consumer development trends in a major city: a market-based approach
The subject matter of this article consists in a comparative analysis of key indicators of consumer market development in major cities of various Subjects of the Russian Federation, which are located in the same macro-region, taking the first three places in the regional hierarchy according to the population of the RF Subject territory, comprising the centres of large urban agglomerations and making a significant contribution to the formation of regional indicators of socio-economic development. The article is based on Federal State Statistics Service data on three RF Subjects namely, Perm Krai, Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk regions covering the period from 2007 to 2015. The study is based on the analysis, classification and systematisation of the information of theoretical sources and statistical data relating to the study, as well as on the presentation of the author’s approaches and conclusions. Thus, within the framework of the research, the author considers different theoretical approaches to the consumer market and proposes a definition for the consumer market of a major city, taking into account the specifics of its functioning as an element of the economy of the city. With regard to the identification of development trends, in the framework of the study, new indices have been applied, such as “index of concentration of stationary retail establishments”, “index of concentration of non-stationary retail establishments”, “index of concentration of public canteens, snack bars”, “index of concentration of canteens owned by the educational institutions, organisations, industrial enterprises” and “index of concentration of restaurants, cafes, bars”. These indices characterise the degree of concentration of different types of retail establishments and catering establishments within a defined territory. According to the research, all cities included in the scope of the study have been grouped according to the identified consumer market development trends. The author has also developed a number of recommendations for the public authorities and local governments for improving the consumer markets of studied cities
A Planning Template for Nonwork Travel and Transit Oriented Development, MTI Report 01-12
The Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI) at San José State University assigned a project team to design a planning template for transit-oriented development (TOD) that incorporates an understanding of nonwork travel, that is, trips for shopping, eating out, and engaging in recreational and cultural activities. Nonwork trips are growing in signifigance and now account for four of every five trips. At the same time, TOD has become a popular planning response to the impacts of metropolitan growth. Some planners believe that TOD will induce more pedestrian and transit trips and will reduce the average length and frequency of household auto travel. This effect is assumed to result from improved accessibility to employment and nonwork venues located in compact, mixed-use centers. Planning professionals in many MPOs also suggest that if multiple centers are linked by high quality transit, such as light or heavy rail, access is enabled to the broad range of nonwork activities. The project arrived at these essential findings: (1) Venues for nonwork activities are very numerous and geographically dispersed. 2) The spatial environment for nonwork activities is the result of growing prosperity, technical innovation, and a dynamic, competitive marketplace. (3) The consumer marketplace will provide many more places to go than mass transit can cost-effectively serve. (4) Current metropolitan planning methods and modeling tools focus on the work trip and do not adequately account for the complexity of nonwork trips and their linkage to work trips. These findings support the need for a new regional planning process to complement current methods. One recommended approach is that metropolitan communities establish a Nonwork Travel Improvement Planning Process using a multidisciplinary expert advisory group interacting with a core, Internet-enabled, professional transportation planning staff. An iterative interaction across varied but relevant skill sets could be achieved through a Backcasting Delphi process. The focus of the interaction would be on understanding the ramifications of consumer and retail industry behavior for TOD and other new transportation strategies, and then assessing the available strategies for cost-effectiveness in reducing the impacts of growth and automobility in a complex and uncertain metropolitan market
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