Title: Aiming for a perceived partnership in relationship lending: a viable tool for differentiation in financial services?

Authors: Nicolaus Lundahl; Lars Silver

Addresses: Centre for Banking and Finance, The Royal Institute of Technology, KTH – Drottning Kristinas väg 30, SE – 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden ' Umeå School of Business and Economics, Umeå University, SE – 901 87 Umeå, Sweden

Abstract: Technological advances, changed regulations and intense competition are a reality for service providers in various industries. For banks, these changes have mostly served transactional approaches. In addition to being of crucial importance for the economy, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are important customers for banks. SMEs often perceive banks as standardised organisations offering identical products and services. Using concepts such as core services reliability, relational services reliability and customer satisfaction, this study investigates whether aiming for a perceived partnership can be a viable differentiating tool for a service provider in a competitive environment consisting of increasingly larger and standardised institutions. The study's hypotheses were tested by the use of structural equations' modelling on questionnaire responses from 343 Swedish SMEs. The results suggest that service providers aiming for a relationship differentiating them from their competitors must, in addition to provide core services, focus on relationship building interactions.

Keywords: banking; small and medium-sized enterprise; SMEs; customer satisfaction; service marketing; relationship lending; structural equation modelling; SEM; Sweden; perceived partnerships; differentiation; financial services; core services reliability; relational services reliability; customer relationships; bank customers.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMED.2013.056432

International Journal of Management and Enterprise Development, 2013 Vol.12 No.4/5/6, pp.277 - 295

Accepted: 13 Mar 2013
Published online: 26 Jul 2014 *

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