Strategic Implications of Digitalisation and FinTechs for Traditional Business Models of the Financial Service Industry – An empirical Study of Banking

Time of realization: 2020–2022
Financing: IGA FPH
Description: Financial services providers are becoming increasingly digital. Banks have to cope with internal and external competition while keeping pace with technological developments. The project’s main objective is to identify implementation barriers to bank digitalization from the bank manager’s point of view both from a qualitative and quantitative perspective.

In particular, since executives have a significant influence on their company and its strategic orientation and success, the project examines digitalization in detail, aiming to facilitate the ultimate adoption of digital approaches with a focus on German banking. Due to the omnipresence and similarity of the cooperative and savings bank sectors in Germany, they are in the focus of the study.

The insights gained from this analysis are intended to provide decision-makers and banking institutions with an initial summary of potential barriers to digitalization in changing market and business situations. The combinatorial analysis of qualitative and quantitative aspects aim to provide managers with recommendations on how to face and overcome barriers to digitalization.

The project consists of the following key activities.

  1. An interview guideline for the banking sector will be developed, which will be used to interview decision-makers and experts on the topics of digitalization. Through this, barriers to digitalization can be quantitatively identified and form the basis in a still young field of barrier research in financial services.
  2. A quantitative analysis of the digitization barriers is carried out with the help of a developed questionnaire, which builds on the qualitative findings, in order to examine their influence on the degree of digitization of a bank.
  3. Qualitative and quantitative findings will be combined to formulate recommendations for banking practice.
Main coordinator: Florian Maximilian Diener, M.A.
Other participants from the Department of Entrepreneurship: doc. Ing. Miroslav Špaček, Ph.D., MBA

Norman Hendrik Riedel, MBA