Service transition strategies in service-dominant settings: Towards all finance solutions in SME markets

Abstract

Irinja Valtanenhas worked as a researcher at the Department of Industrial Management, Tampere University of Technology, Finland. Her research interest focuses on financial services marketing, particularly in relation to comprehensive financial services of bank and insurance. Her work has been previously published in International Journal of Bank Marketing and VINE Journal of Information and Knowledge Management Systems.ABSTRACT Intense competition and extensive customer needs are motivating companies to develop so-called 'solution' offerings in service industries. Building on service transition strategy literature, this article outlines the practical activities that broad-based financial service providers take in transitioning towards 'all finance' solutions and accentuates the inhibitors that their business customers perceive in this process. The empirical data consists of 40 semi-structured interviews among two service providers and 17 of their smalland medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers. The results show that the service transition strategies of service extension and relationship focus are increasingly utilized in the financial industry. However, the integration of various components within a comprehensive bank and insurance offering is still in its early stages, suggesting providers rely mainly on a pure component strategy. SME customers, who seem to have taken the role of independent value creators, fail to perceive the benefits of purchasing comprehensive offerings from a single provider. Thereby, they tend to follow price-based purchase behaviour and negotiate their service offering with many different providers.

Investigating the relationships between service capabilities and financial statements indicators

“…1,2 While the Resource Based View (RBV) theorizes how strategies are formed and their expected outcomes, the field would benefit from empirical research testing the linkage between resources, capabilities, asset-structure and value creation. 1,3 Particularly in the service sector, where room for competition is wider, the profit margins are potentially higher, and these kind of studies more scant, 4 the study of innovative and value-creating service strategies is a research priority. [5][6][7][8][9] This study analyses how firms' resources are bundled in logistics service capabilities (hereafter service capabilities or, more simply, capabilities), and how these service capabilities impact on a series of key financial statements indicators.…”