Relationship marketing and its application to retail banking has become a common theme in managerial and academic literature. This article argues that the rhetoric of relationship marketing has been used to obscure banks' real strategic objective, cost reduction. Those cost reductions have been...

As competitive liberalisation and the application of technology in the creation and distribution of financial services have increased consumer choice in the UK personal financial service industry, so consumer choice in the UK personal financial services industry, so consumer behaviour has...

Summary The paper discusses the constitution of the consuming subject in lifestyle practices of belonging and difference, taste and choice in the material circumstances of everyday living. It considers how lived moments of mundane activity can be understood, not simply as sites of social...

The academic literature has regularly argued that market discipline can support regulatory authority discipline to monitor banking sector stability. This includes, amongst other things, using forward-looking market prices to identify those credit institutions that are most at risk of failure....

Syndicated lending is a widely practiced alternative to traditional bilateral lending and within Europe the syndicated loan market increased significantly during the 2000s. Using a dataset consisting of 4166 European banks, the authors examine the factors that determine the bank's willingness to...

Given current debates on the future direction of regulatory design, the first objective of this paper is to contextualise the issues surrounding bank market discipline. Accordingly, the paper raises awareness of the current key themes within incentive-based regulatory design and analyses the...

In the early 1990s, India and Pakistan introduced a series of financial liberalisation initiatives aimed at increasing the productivity of their financial services sector. Against a background of unprecedented change, which these initiatives heralded, the paper applies a DEA-type Malmquist total...

In the aftermath of the Cruickshank Report (2000) and the Competition Commission's investigation (2002) into SME--bank relationships, this paper examines the current state of the small business--bank relationship and ascertains whether the Internet could be used to improve the quality of the...