Financial services comprise over 4 percent of the gross domestic product of the United States and employ over 5.4 million people. By offering vehicles for investment of savings, extension of credit and risk management, they fuel the modern capitalistic society.<p> <p>While the essential functions...</p></p>

How does a retail bank innovate? Traditional innovation literature would suggest that organizations innovate by getting new and/or improved products to market. However, in a service, the product is the process. Thus, innovation in banking lies more in process and organizational changes than in...

A decade of econometric research has shown that X-efficiency dominates scale and scope as the drivers of inefficiency in the U.S. banking industry. However, this research falls short in explaining the causes of the high degree of X-efficiency in the industry. This paper summarizes a four-year...

How does a retail bank innovate? Traditional innovation literature would suggest that organizations innovate by getting new and/or improved products to market. However, in a service, the product is the process. Thus, innovation in banking lies more in process and organizational changes than in...

This case study in retail banking reviews the work of a Wharton School research team which has been tracking the process of change at one of the larger American commercial banks. The bank is referred to by the pseudonym "National Bank." The team's research focuses on how a bank chooses what...

The financial services industry is the major investor in information technology in the U.S. economy; the typical bank spends as much as 15% of non-interest expenses on IT. A persistent finding of research into the performance of financial institutions is that performance and efficiency vary...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has been widely studied in the literature since its inception in 1978 and is a key analytical technique used in Wharton's performance analysis for retail delivery systems. The methodology behind the classical DEA, the oriented method, is to hold inputs (outputs)...