The banking sector often plays a crucial role in the improvement of infrastructure and economy of any country. In many emerging economies, it is apparent that a wide variety of social and political issues are related to the associated supply chain sustainability of financial service firms. Although such sustainability and its implementation issues have largely been addressed in existing research literature and in practice for many years, the attention towards socio-political sustainability aspects has been quite limited. Thus, this study attempted to explore the determinants for improving socio-political sustainability in financial service firms. Through adopting the fuzzy Delphi method (FDM), performing an exhaustive literature review, and conducting semi-structured interviews with the decision-makers of the service firms, nine key barriers for socio-political sustainability were first identified in this study. Then, the influence relationships of the key barriers were assessed by 15 experts. During the assessment process, the interrelationships and their dependence powers among key barriers were analyzed using the interpretive structural modelling (ISM) approach and cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) methods. The assessment results show that among the studied barriers, “antisocial considerations”, “unstable political climate”, and “lack of political coherence” are the decisive barriers that affect the socio-political sustainability in the supply chain of financial service firms. The knowledge in understanding and reducing these decisive barriers can provide service sector practitioners, especially those with limited resources, the enhanced capability to conduct better planning and designing of effective and continuous improvement programs, so as to win over new consumers and retain existing clients by offering sustainable services.

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Strategic outsourcing prevails over the open market after globalization. Companies strategically outsource suppliers who have distinctive advantage to enhance their business values. This paper aims to examine the target costing practice in outsourcing partners from organizational and technique perspectives and to find out causes for dissimilarity of brand-lead target cost system differ among outsourcing partners. We discovered that target costing processes are lead by the brand company with target costs, and accomplished by contract manufacturers to exercise a series of target costing techniques. Value engineering, lean production, utilization of cost table, cross-functional teamwork, and close supply chain network influence the performance of the target costing. Further, the problem solving capabilities imbedded in outsourced organizations generate a higher level of target costing achievement.