How Do Financial Services Stack Up? Findings from a Benchmarking Study of the US Financial Service Sector

Since the early 1980s, numerous universities and institutes have conducted competitiveness benchmarking studies comparing practices and performance of firms in various industries worldwide (see, for example,Roth, Gray, Singhal, and Singhal, 1997). The goal of such studies is to develop an understanding of what works and.what does not work in manufacturing, what are best practices, and as the name implies, benchmarking one’s own company and industry against others as a starting point for improving operational performance. One would expect that similar benefits would accrue to financial services, yet there are few systematic benchmarking studies reported in the literature. (An exception being the series of benchmarking studies of world class strategies and performance in retail banking conducted by researchers at University of North Carolina under the aegis of the Bank Administration Institute from 1987 to 1993 (Roth and Van der Velde, 1991 Roth and Van der Velde, 1992; Roth, 1993;Roth and Jackson, 1995).)

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