Index of Paper Presentations for the Parallel Sessions - Academy of ...

IntroductionRetail banking is an essential service all over the world. It represents a huge market in its ownright, with a reported net income of €1,280 billion in 2006 and an income projection of €1,900billion by 2017 (World Retail Banking Report, 2008). The global landscape for retail banking isalso changing rapidly with the entry of global players into emerging markets and the introductionof technology-driven services such as contactless payments and mobile banking (World RetailBanking Report, 2008). In an era of fiscal and monetary volatility and regulatory tightening indeveloped markets since the global financial crisis in 2007/8, banks have sought to grow moreorganically in their local markets, competing on the basis of pricing, product diversification,cross-selling and market segmentation to increase client value and retention.Unlike institutional or investment banking, retail banking remains a local business (WorldBanking Report, 2008), with most of its activities focused on day-to-day, transaction-basedproducts and services. As customers become more demanding, however, banks have to lookbeyond the technical, logistical, technological and sales-driven model of marketing in order toachieve organic market growth and to ward off increasing competition. These challenges areparticularly acute in the case of local banks who seek to offer standardized levels of service to itscustomers.In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the role of local culture in shaping consumerservice delivery (Zhang et al., 2008). To what extent should local banks offer a ‗global‘servicescape? What are the features of such a servicescape in the case of retail banks and how doconsumers and employees perceive it?Despite a growing body of research into these issues in various contexts, there is relatively littleresearch into the servicescape of retail banks. Specifically, there is, to the best of our knowledge,no in-depth research into the localization or globalization of servicescapes in retail banking.Further, systematic research into consumers‘ perspectives and input into servicescape design isunder-developed. This paper is intended to expand our understanding of these two gaps in theliterature. We focus our research on several banks which have extensive retail bankingoperations in two Asian markets: Bangladesh and Singapore. In Bangladesh we focus on onestate owned retail bank and two privately owned banks and in Singapore we cover two privatelyowned banks with substantial retail banking operations. On the face of it, these two sites representtwo opposite ends of the development spectrum: Bangladesh is a developing country which,despite many political and economic hurdles, has shown promising prospects of becoming a