Business excellence model for retail banking

Creating customer value and building stockholder value are the cornerstones for excellence in any business endeavour. In an under-developed economy, financial institutions may accomplish these objectives through a customer focus strategy and implementation of some quality management principles. However, with the increasing accessibility to new technologies and intensified competition, managers have been alerted and become more aware of the fact that achieving excellence is made even more difficult - financial institutions must now do much more to excel in the competitive retail banking environment of the new millennium. It is believed, and the findings of the present work support, that the formulation of a robust improvement model capable of guiding through the whole excellence pursuant process will provide a solid foundation for successfully meeting the challenge.

The burning desire to enhance competitiveness and drive for achieving business excellence have nurtured the development of a new Business Excellence Model for successful implementation of TQM in retail banking. It was found that existing TQM and business excellence models provide only prescriptive and indicative roadmaps for companies to follow but fail to provide a complete coverage of TQM concepts, holistic measure of business excellence and validated links between TQM elements and business excellence. Hence, some financial institutions may cast doubts on their applicability of TQM because the relationships between TQM principles and the results of business excellence are not assessed. As such, it should be valuable to develop and provide a model, which is capable of covering the TQM essence in a structured way to drive total quality improvement efforts.

The present research aims to develop a theory-driven as well as practical model for retail banks and the retail banking sector to achieve business excellence. In the process, Hong Kong retail banks and the Hong Kong retail banking sector were chosen as the context for the present research to obtain valuable data on how successful implementation of TQM essence could contribute to business excellence in a Chinese society. Both employees and customers inputs, being the important sources of stakeholder information, have been the basis for analysis. Top performing bank's executives were interviewed to identify the core activities and factors that determine their bank's success. Further, data were collected from executives of 47 retail banks in Hong Kong. Structural equation modelling was employed to develop the new Business Excellence Model (BEM). SEM's software programme was employed to analyse the goodness of fit of the new BEM. The forces of excellence indices and business excellence indices of the sampled retail banks were computed using the Partial Least Squares (PLS) technique. The same procedure was also applied to the data collected ll from retail customers in the survey to measure the level of customer satisfaction of the retail banking sector. The indices of the BEM were then matched to the customer satisfaction indices of retail banks and retail banking sector for higher level of analysis. Findings of the present work indicate that the new BEM fits the data of the 47 retail banks very well. The BEM is a valid and reliable model for enabling retail banks to review the current level of practice in relation to their critical success factors continuously. With the new BEM, they can now measure and drive improvement in their critical activities and finally achieving business excellence. Similar results obtained for customer focus dimension of the BEM and the customer satisfaction measurement have further substantiated the robustness and usefulness of the new BEM. Hence, the new Business Excellence Model should be a valuable means for retail banks and the retail banking sector to pursue business excellence and to gain a competitive edge in the new millennium.