A Typology of Innovations in Retail-Banking

Download or read book A Typology of Innovations in Retail-Banking written by Veronique Favre-Bonte and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the beginning of the 1990s, the topic of innovation management has been increasingly present in the strategic speeches of companies. However, researchers focus their attention mainly on technological innovations in the industrial sector and abandon the service sector, which is, nevertheless, the first in terms of capacity to innovate. However, services are very heterogeneous, so we suggest focusing on one case: the little-studied case of retail banking. We aim to propose a typology of innovations in retail banking and to clarify the concept and its implications for banks. We propose, through the study of the main French banking group (Crédit Agricole), to investigate the various facets of innovation in this sector. So we aim to: (a) capture the specificities of innovation in the retail banking sector; (b) propose a typology of the various forms of innovation developed in this sector, and (c) discuss future ways of research. The analysis of the innovation practices within Crédit Agricole highlights three main contributions. First, banks do not only innovate in an incremental way. Second, while the literature often focused on technology as the only source of innovation, sources are in fact multiple: regulatory relief, new customers' needs, and competitors' innovations. Third, innovation in the retail banking sector often takes the shape of process innovation, which is hardly patentable and can be easily copied, unlike product innovation. This characteristic means that such innovations are almost invisible to customers and competitors, but allow banks to obtain a durable competitive advantage.