Measurement of the performance of an investment bank using the operational competitiveness rating procedure

The Hong Kong branch of an international investment bank hired additional staff in anticipation of increased business activity that eventually did not quite materialize and management was concerned about the effect of that decision on the bank's overall performance profile. This paper summarizes a study we carried out to address two related questions using only the available data at the time: (1) what is the direction of the overall performance trend and (2) how serious has the impact of the incremental costs of hiring additional staff been on the Bank's overall performance? The discussion in this paper focuses on the construction of the bank's performance profile using a new performance measurement method called operational competitiveness rating analysis (OCRA). The paper also includes comparisons of OCRA and data envelopment analysis (DEA) ratings and profit scores to show the validity support among the three approaches as well as underscore their differences.