Guest editorial

Citation

Zopounidis, C. (2008), "Guest editorial", Managerial Finance, Vol. 34 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/mf.2008.00934caa.001

Guest editorial

During the last decades many changes have taken place in financial institutions around the world, since a restructuring and concentration process took place in many European countries.

With the deregulation of the Greek Banking Industry in the 1980s and the enactment of the Second Banking Directive after 1992, the Greek financial market has become much more attractive. Moreover, the growth margins of the Greek banking industry have been considered quite significant compared with those of European Union. The globalization, the intensified competition and the rapid changes in the socio-economic and technological environment have had a major impact on the global financial environment. Nowadays, the Greek banking system is characterized by a high degree of concentration and competitiveness. In Greece, the five largest banks occupy the 70 per cent of the market and can cover sectors that small banks cannot. Based on the statistics of the Hellenic Bank Association, there are almost 3,261 bank branches and 63,611 employees in Greece.

The number of mergers and acquisitions has an effect on the concentration in the Greek banking market, which remains high, although lower than in other EU Member states. Many Greek domestic banks follow a tendency of merger or acquisition by a foreign one. Regarding the total assets, the market share of the five largest banks amounted to 67.5 per cent at the end of 2002, whereas, despite the mergers and acquisitions, the size of Greek credit institutions remains relatively small compared to banks in other EU countries. By the end of 2002, the five largest Greek banks (Alpha Bank, EFG Eurobank Ergasias, Emporiki Bank of Greece, National Bank of Greece, Piraeus Bank) were ranked among the 200 largest European banks, in terms of total assets.

All the above, the high degree of concentration as well as the margins of credit growth drove banks to a variety of new banking products in order to satisfy the increased customer needs. The establishment of these new products requires the implementation of innovative and advanced processes for their efficient management.

All these issues have been the major motivation for the preparation and publication of this special issue. The objective of the special issue is to present the most recent studies concerning the Greek Banking Industry through the implementation of advanced mathematical techniques such as data envelopment analysis, mathematical programming, econometric analysis techniques, etc. The use of these methodologies contributes to the overall evaluation of the performance, operation and efficiency of the Greek Banking System.

After a rigorous reviewing process, five papers were finally accepted for publication in the special issue. The special issue begins with the paper of Kyriaki Kosmidou, who extends earlier work on the determinants of profitability of Greek commercial banks and examines to what extent the profits of banks are influenced by internal and external factors, during the period 1990-2002 using an unbalanced pooled time series dataset of 23 banks through an econometric methodology. The second paper, by Athanasios Noulas, Niki Glaveli and Ioannis Kiriakopoulos, examines the effects of various selected branches on variations of efficiency by measuring the cost efficiency of 58 branches of a major Greek commercial bank in six large cities for the period 2000 and 2001 via the data envelopment analysis. The third paper, by Dimitris Giokas, examines the operating efficiency of a set of 171 retail orientation bank branches of a large commercial bank in Greece through the data envelopment analysis. Two semi-parametrical statistical tests and one non-parametric test were also used to choose the appropriate data envelopment analysis model. The fourth paper by Maria Mavri and George Ioannou, examines the impact of qualitative groups of factors in retention behavior, the customers' attrition considering the time aspect and uses life tables in order to estimate the churn behavior of clients in different periods of time. Moreover, a hazard proportional model is constructed to determine the risk of customer behavior. The last paper of the special issue, by Fotios Pasiouras and Constantin Zopounidis, examines the relationship between banks performance and the likelihood of acquisition in the Greek banking industry during the period 1998-2002 via the logistic regression.

Sincere thanks must be expressed to all the authors whose contributions have been essential in creating this special issue. I also owe a great debt to those who worked long and hard to review all the submitted papers and contributed to the achievement of this special issue's high standard.

Constantin ZopounidisGuest Editor