Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are one of the buoyant businesses in the global economy with abundant resources that have not been fully exploited. Despite several revelations on the challenges of SMEs, little to none have comprehensively captured financial factors affecting the performance of SMEs, particularly, in the Kenyan leather sector. This study explores financial factors that are affecting the performance of SMEs using the case of the leather industry sector in Kenya. The study data was collected by administering questionnaires to 300 respondents who were randomly chosen from SMEs within Kenyan leather sector. The study found that financial literacy, credit access and tax are statistically significant financial factors affecting the performances of SMEs. As a result, the study recommends that Government should increase its commitment to develop SMEs by offering favorable tax rates and tax exemptions to SMEs especially those in the leather sector of Kenya. Also, SMEs should heighten their financial literacy which will help augment their access to credit.

Financial services are intangible and the only way to attract and retain customers is to seek out what they expect and design services to meet these expectations. This study was conducted to investigate customers’ evaluation of service quality in the Ghanaian banking industry using Cal Bank Limited as a case study institution and to recommend effective ways to improve the quality of service delivery. A convenience sampling technique was utilized in a 200 sample-size selection from Cal Bank customers in the Kumasi Metropolis, Ghana. Structured questionnaire adopted from the SERVQUAL instrument was used to gather primary data from customers and SPSS Statistics version 21 was employed as the main statistical tool. It is evident in this study that customers are dissatisfied with the overall level of service quality provided by the bank. However, customers are satisfied with empathy and assurance dimensions. The study further revealed that all the five dimensions of service quality significantly influence the service quality of the bank and the dimension with greatest impact is reliability, which has the highest coefficient. This means that the bank needs to pay much attention to reliability as a service quality component and improve upon the reliable services provided to customers whilst maintaining or improving the other dimensions.

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