Determinants of banks selection in USA, Taiwan and Ghana

Abstract

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to investigate bank choice/selection criteria in a range of cultural and country economic scenarios. More specifically, the purpose of this study is to understand international consumers' selection criteria of banks using the USA, Taiwan, and Ghana as illustrations.Design/methodology/approachFollowing a literature review, the paper adopts the classical multi‐step scale development process which demanded that thorough attention be paid to every step of the process. The study employed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to assess the reliability of the results.FindingsThe study reveals three key dimensions/factors/strategies that are consistent across all three economies. The paper concludes that open and liberalized business climate appear to explain consumers' decisions.Research limitations/implicationsThis research is based on the college student cohort and thus the results do not represent the public. This poses generalizability questions without further replications and validations. This study did not examine whether there were consumers' switching behaviors involving banks.Practical implicationsInsights derived from this study will provide bank managers and advertising executives with the building blocks for understanding consumers' choice criteria of banks in industrialized, newly industrialized and liberalized developing economies.Originality/valueA comprehensive validated scale measuring international consumers' selection of banks is proposed. In view of the scarce stream of empirical studies dealing with consumers' selection of banks in liberalized developing nations, this research comes at an opportune time, as several governments in these economies are encouraging bank savings, channeling college students' loans through bank accounts and proactively attracting global banks to establish branches in their countries. This study complements the extant literature dealing with consumers' selection of banks. Finally, a cross‐national and cross‐cultural dataset of consumers' choice criteria of banks have been put forward that would enhance further appreciation of the subject of banks selection in varying economies.

Understanding Islamic Bank Selection of Customers: A Field Research from Turkish Participation Banks

“…(Kaynak & Harcar, 2005) The USA Service, image, charges (Blankson, Cheng, & Spears, 2007) The USA, Taiwan, Ghana Convenience, competence, recommendation by peers, free banking (Şafakli, 2007) Northern The last column of Table 1 shows the important selection criteria of customers in the research countries for conventional banks only. Keeping these criteria in mind, we can now look at the IB literature for customer bank selection.…”

Ethnicity and Choice Criteria in Retail Banking: A Malaysian Perspective

“…A number of studies at different points in time have been conducted in the Far East; for example, Kaynak and Kucukemiroglu (1992) in Hong Kong; Huu and Kar (2000) and Gerrard and Cunningham (2001) in Singapore and Lang and Chua (1989);Che Wel and Mohd Nor (2003) and Mokhlis et al (2008) in Malaysia. Other researchers have recently investigated international consumers' choice criteria of banks in a range of cultural and country economic scenario (Blankson et al 2007(Blankson et al , 2009.…”

Using the Analytical Hierarchy Process Framework to Study Bank Selection Criteria of Students in Institute of Professional Studies in Ghana

“…Although there has been criticism regarding the use of students as surrogate consumers and also about the validity and generalizability of student samples, university students are deemed appropriate for this study since students are actual customers of banks and conversant with bank products (Yoo et al, 2000). Blankson et al (2007) posited that although students differ from non-student adults, they do represent homogenous groups even across cultures.…”

“…Case study approach (Yin, 2003) is more appropriate. We follow the examples of Spears et al (2001), Cunningham et al (2006) and Blankson et al (2007) in adopting the student cohort as the empirical context for this study. Whilst others have argued that students cannot be considered as cohorts, Thwaites and Vere (1995) have pointed out the special features and importance of the undergraduate market in the eyes of bankers because of their potential.…”

“…Such studies no doubt have contributed substantially to the literature on bank selection but their findings may not be applicable to developing countries like Ghana due to different cultural, political and economic setup. Blankson et al (2007) did some work on undergraduate bank selection which partly covered Ghana. surveyed the opinion of 2000 retail customers of 22 banks in Ghana to determine their bank selection criteria.…”