Cost structures and new technology: a case study of a bank in South Africa

There has been considerable development in the technology used to provide bank services. This has led to an increase in the number of channels which can be used to deliver bank services to retail clients. Accordingly, there is a need to assess the costs of using different technologies to provide services to retail bank clients. In this paper, detailed cost data are used to estimate two stochastic frontier models of the cost of providing retail services for clients who use the branch bank teller and those who use an information technology based approach. We remove the inefficiencies in the cost estimates of the two different technologies to enable forecasts of the cost consequences of shifts in technology to be based on production technique best practice. The findings suggest that benefits can be obtained by reducing inefficiency and by extending new technology more broadly to lower income retail clients.