Prediction of bank failures in emerging financial markets: an ANN approach

Purpose – The recent financial crises in the world have brought attention to the need for a new international financial architecture which rests on crisis prevention, crisis prediction and crisis management. It is therefore both desirable and vital to explore new predictive techniques for providing early warnings to regulatory agencies. The purpose of this study is to propose a new technique to prevent future crises, with reference to the last banking crises in Turkey. Design/methodology/approach – ANN is utilized as an inductive algorithm in discovering predictive knowledge structures in financial data and used to explain previous bank failures in the Turkish banking sector as a special case of EFMs (emerging financial markets). Findings – The empirical results indicate that ANN is proved to differentiate patterns or trends in financial data. Most of the bank failures could be predicted long before, with the utilization of an ANN classification approach, but more importantly it could be proposed to detect early warning signals of potential failures, as in the case of the Turkish banking sector. Practical implications – The regulatory agencies could use ANN as an alternative method to predict and prevent future systemic banking crises in order to minimize the cost to the economy. Originality/value – This paper reveals that the ANN approach can be proposed as a promising method of evaluating financial conditions in terms of predictive accuracy, adaptability and robustness, and as an alternative early warning method that can be used along with the most common alternatives such as CAMEL, financial ratio and peer group analysis, comprehensive bank risk assessment, and econometric models.