Pricing of card payment services in Scandinavian banking

Pricing of card payment services includes many considerations of cost and revenue in an environment of changing payment technology, network effects in two-sided markets and price bundling. This paper describes the consumer pricing methods for card payment services by Scandinavian banks and evaluates their explicit pricing methods. The main findings suggest that Scandinavian banks in general are more interested in earning revenue from implicit prices than in encouraging the use of more cost efficient technology by charging explicit transaction fees. However, the pricing methods applied may vary, depending on the country and a bank's service supply.     

Reply to: pricing of card payment services in Scandinavian banking: a comment,by Leo Van Hove

A comment on the previously published paper ‘Pricing of card payment services in Scandinavian banking’ has been written by Leo Van Hove and published in this issue of The Service Industries Journal; it suggests alternative analytical approaches and other implications of the results. This reply develops the study further, providing new presentations of the empirical data and discussing its conclusions. The suggestions and approaches provided by Van Hove do not change the conclusions drawn in the paper, and in-depth implications of the results in a wider context are outside the scope of the paper. However, this reply proposes further empirical studies regarding the pricing of card payment services.     

Credit lender–borrower relationship in the credit card market – Implications for credit risk management strategy and relationship marketing

Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in 2008, precipitating the international financial crisis. Many questioned the banks’ risk-taking credit system. Understanding credit risk and how the credit system functions may provide knowledge on managing credit, to avoid another such international crisis. We study the credit card field and present a pricing decision model for managing credit risk. Recent credit lenders’ portfolio re-pricing practices call for immediate attention to the credit lender–borrower relationship and relationship marketing. A literature review and recent phenomena in the credit card industry reveal that the lenders’ re-pricing strategy negatively affects the credit lender–borrower relationship and relationship marketing. Thus, we introduce a pricing decision model incorporating the lenders’ re-pricing strategy and the credit lender–borrower relationship. Further, we discuss the implications of, and the role of marketing in, credit risk management and the implications of relationship marketing for credit lenders in foreign markets, including the US market.     

激励规制、市场势力与接入定价——以电信业为例

政府规制的目标是矫正市场失灵,不当的规制方案会限制市场竞争活力,阻碍技术创新.本文将规制机构、厂商和消费者纳入到激励相容框架下,通过考察信息约束条件下的接入定价问题,解释了产品的需求价格弹性、政府转移支付、税收政策、技术创新和网络外部性与接入定价的关系,引申出主导性厂商市场势力的来源及激励性接入定价政策,得出电信监管部门实施对网间结算费的直接规制,没有减弱市场势力,反而抑制了主导性厂商提高接入质量和研发创新.     

Who Pays for Credit Cards?

The authors model side payments in a competitive credit‐card market. If competitive retailers absorb the cost of accepting credit cards by charging a higher goods price to everyone, then someone must subsidize convenience users of credit cards to prevent them from defecting to merchants who do not accept cards. The side payment could be financed by card users who roll over balances and pay interest. It is rational for them to do so if their subjective discount rates are high enough. Charging different prices to different customers based on the underlying cost of the payment instrument would be more efficient for retailers. However, banks may offer incentives to attract convenience users because some of them may become interest‐paying users (“revolvers”) in the future.     

Bank x-efficiency in Ukraine: An analysis of service characteristics and ownership

This paper investigates managerial and scale x-efficiencies of commercial banks in Ukraine from 1998 to 2003. A large number of banks would suggest competition and efficiency. Ukrainian banks waste half of factor inputs during the production of services by operating off the efficient frontier. Large banks dominate in managerial efficiency; small banks are superior in scale efficiency. Significant numbers of small banks experience increasing returns to scale. Consolidation between small banks may help banks exploit economies of scale and become attractive foreign investment targets. Evidence suggests majority foreign owned joint ventures are optimal formats; banks operating in industrial, politically favored areas outperform others.     

银行如何防范开立《对外预付款还款保函》的风险

为中国船厂开立《对外预付款还款保函》（下称“保函”）是国内银行支持中国船厂发展船舶出口贸易的重要手段，也是国内银行进军国际船舶融资市场的第一站。目前以中国进出口银行为代表，已有十几家国内银行将开立《保函》作为一项经常性的金融业务。     

商业银行贷款定价问题浅析

随着我国利率市场化改革的推进 ,商业银行贷款定价的自主权逐步扩大 ,贷款价格确定是否合理对商业银行经营战略的实施具有重要的现实意义。因此 ,贷款定价研究是商业银行战略发展中必须重视的问题。     

银行机构和支付机构的支付服务比较研究

支付服务市场潜力巨大,有待深度挖掘。研究表明:银行与第三方支付机构各具优势,各自的核心市场和利益并不存在严重重叠和排斥。双方相互弥补和配合可充分开拓市场。在未来发展中,银行在传统金融服务领域依旧会占据主导地位,第三方支付将在网上支付等创新服务领域占据稳固市场。银行方面应完善电子渠道建设,拓展备付金存管业务,增加中间业务收入;加大金融创新力度,加强与支付机构的合作,积极应对金融传媒;介入电子支付链,大力拓展中小企业融资业务,拓展新客户群体。支付机构方面应进一步细分市场,发挥自身优势开展差别化经营;加强技术安全合作,完善内控管理,加强消费者权益的保护;严格备付金管理,提升风险管理水平,稳健、规范、可持续发展。     

A Client Driven Model for Service Pricing

The pricing of services is perhaps the most important and perplexing issue facing marketers today. Success depends on setting it correctly. Although economic principles do provide pricing guidelines, they are often too general to apply in everyday business settings. This article presents an alternative by describing a pricing model meant to help the front-line marketer. The model is "Client Driven" because it is built on client response to price, namely the quantity of services used and the number of clients gained or lost. Its objective is to set a price level, both short and long-term, to maximize profits. It works equally well for the marketing of either services or products. This article explores the model's structure, major findings and implications. A number of interesting results are obtained; for example the relationship between optimal price and market share. The article also illustrates with an actual case how to use the model in practical settings. The model can easily be set up on a personal computer, and is a useful simulation tool for exploring pricing strategy.     

存款保险定价模型与中国模式选择

本文引进了存款保险定价的期权定价模型和预期损失模型,针对中国现阶段的商业银行经营状况,在预期损失模型的基础上,真实测算了存款保险费率,并建设性地从中国国情出发提出了存款保险费率的基本模式和基于混合方法的拓展模式。最后评价了本文所涉及的存款保险定价模型,并基于实务的角度提出了存款保险费率确定机制。     

Too close to be similar: Product and price competition in retail gasoline markets

We examine how product and pricing decisions of retail gasoline stations depend on local market demographics and the degree of competitive intensity in the market. We are able to shed light on the observed empirical phenomenon that proximate gasoline stations price very similarly in some markets, but very differently in other markets. Our analysis of product design and price competition between firms integrates two critical dimensions of heterogeneity across consumers: Consumers differ in their locations and in their travel costs, as in models of horizontal differentiation. They also differ in their relative preference or valuations for product quality dimensions, in terms of the offered station services (such as pay-at-pump, number of service bays or other added services), as in models of vertical differentiation. We find that the degree of local competitive intensity and the dispersion in consumer incomes are sufficient to explain variations in the product and pricing choices of competing firms. Closely located retailers who face sufficient income dispersion across consumers in a local market may differentiate on product design and pricing strategies. In contrast, retailers that are farther apart from each other may adopt similar product design and pricing strategies if the market is relatively homogeneous on income. Using empirical survey data on prices and station characteristics gathered across 724 gasoline stations in the St. Louis metropolitan area, and employing a multivariate logit model that predicts the joint probability of stations within a local market differentiating on product design and pricing strategies as a function of market demographics and local competitive intensity, we find strong support for the central implications of the theory.

Retailers and their relationships with their financial services suppliers: the case of debit card charges in the United Kingdom

The mid 1990s has seen a very rapid growth in both the holding and use of debit cards in the UK. There are now just over 27 million debit cards issued in the UK under the marques Switch and Visa Delta. Debit card transactions immediately debit the account of the card holder. These transactions are acquired by a financial institution (the acquirer), who reimburses the retailer of the purchase sum minus a negotiated fee, the merchant service charge (MSC). In the UK the MSC is a fixed fee per transaction as opposed to credit card transactions that are levied as a percentage of the transaction value. The level of the fixed fee payments vary enormously from just a few pence for large corporate clients to anything up to 80 p for some small independent retailers. The authors of this paper were commissioned to undertake a research programme into retailer attitudes to card payment systems. This paper will outline the main implication of the research in terms of marketing the acquiring service to retailers and consequent relationship between acquirer and retailer. Relationship marketing can be seen as a return to a more traditional method of bank management, in terms of close relationships between banks and businesses. With the development of specialist sections and departments such as card services there may have been a more transactional marketing approach by the banks. Merchant acquirers should focus more attention on retention rather than recruitment and treat each customer as an individual. Factors other than price and technology, for example quality and customer service, should be emphasized to protect themselves from competition and to encourage long term customer loyalty.     

Smart Card-Based Electronic Card Payment Systems in the Transportation Industry

Many products and services will soon be (or are already being) sold over the Internet or other networks. Paying for these with standard methods of payments, such as cash, checks, credit card, or debit card, may be ineffective or inefficient. For such cases, electronic card payment systems are more appropriate. Several things need to be considered when investigating electronic card payment system options, including: customer needs and benefits, developmental and operational cost, corporate benefits, continually changing technologies, critical mass of customers, security, standards of payment systems, and customer perception and comfort with new technologies. In this article, we analyze how smart card-based systems are used in mass transportation. Managers in mass transportation face the following questions: Do you develop your own electronic card payment system, do you wait for multifunctional cards that will be accepted across many industries to provide the functionality required in your market, or do you do nothing. The discussion here concentrates mainly on the transportation industry, where the transactions and payments are made on local area networks.     

Spatial competition and market power in banking

Banks in non-metropolitan areas compete in a spatially differentiated environment. Non-metro community banks have been insulated from increasing competition from metro banks due to their reliance on soft information in relationship lending. Proximity to borrowers, therefore, may be an important source of market power for non-metro community banks. This paper estimates a structural model of the supply and demand of banking services in which pricing power is allowed to depend explicitly on the distance between rival banks. A spatial autoregressive econometric model shows that approximately 38.0% of economic surplus earned by firms in non-metropolitan banking in the upper midwest is due to spatial market power.     

人民币国际计价功能的特点研究

随着中国对外开放程度不断提高,人民币逐渐走出国门,特别是党的十八大以来,人民币加入特别提款权(SDR),其国际货币的地位初步奠定。目前,人民币已成为全球第五大支付货币,全球已有60多个央行或货币当局将人民币纳入外汇储备。本文结合人民币国际计价功能的发展,对其特点进行了具体分析。研究发现:人民币计价功能的区域性特征明显,人民币在国际金融计价中的比重增长较快,增加人民币供给为其实现国际计价功能提供了有力保障,互联网和移动支付是实现人民币计价功能的重要通道。     

Zone of tolerance for banks: a diagnostic model of service quality

Service quality has become an increasingly important factor for success and survival in the banking sector. Provision of high-quality service aids in meeting several requirements such as customer satisfaction and its consequent loyalty and market share, soliciting new customers, financial performance, and profitability (Cui, C.C., Lewis, B.R., & Park, W. (2003). Service quality measurement in the banking sector in South Korea. International Journal of Bank Marketing, 21(4), 191–201.). This paper presents the bank service quality measurement in its extended form. It deals with the concept of ‘zone of tolerance’ in judgments of service quality proposed by Zeithaml, Berry, and Parasuraman (1993, The nature and determinants of customer expectations of service. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 21(1), 1–12.). The ‘zone of tolerance’ is recognized in the service quality literature as representing a range of expectations and an area of acceptable outcomes in service interactions. The present study describes the zone of tolerance for young customers’ service expectations and determines the customer satisfaction level for banks. The study focusses only on the youth market to formulate long-term strategies because young customers tend to keep themselves up to date with latest technological developments. A conceptual model BANKZOT is presented in this study, and the results demonstrate that evaluation of services can be scaled according to different types of expectations – ‘desired' and ‘adequate’ – and that customers use these two types of expectations as a comparison standard in evaluating bank services. The findings reveal that young customers have a narrow zone of tolerance with regard to the services provided by the banks. The results with respect to gap analysis reveal that there was a shortfall in the service quality provided by the banks in the sample, with the largest gap being found in tangibles and empathy of service quality dimensions. The results of exploratory factor analysis reveal that the SERVQUAL model is found to be uni-dimensional in this study. The results, managerial implications, and future research implications are discussed in detail.     

Uniform or spatially differentiated? Pricing Strategies for Information Goods under simultaneous and sequential decision-making in multi-market context

Product pricing has been one of the central issues in the field of marketing and consumer services for managers and researchers alike. However, pricing of information goods has not been paid much attention in literature. For information goods the marginal costs of production and transportation of information goods (online movies, video games, etc.) is almost zero. Hence, the pricing decisions need to be thought of purely in competitive profit maximizing terms. This paper proposes mechanisms for managers to evaluate and base their pricing decisions on rational frameworks that takes into account various situations when they enter a new market and when they are incumbent in a new market. This paper addresses the research gap of spatially differentiated pricing strategy for information goods that has not been studied in literature so far. We create stylized theoretical models under both, sequential and simultaneous decision-making conditions. We determine the equilibrium price and the equilibrium profit for the two firms for each of the four possible scenarios based on their pricing strategies. Our analysis reveals that the dominance of one pricing strategy over the other depends on product differentiation factor capturing joint effect of the product substitutability and consumer's price sensitivity under sequential decision making and the market size along with consumer's price sensitivity for simultaneous decision making. As an extension, we propose a generalized model demonstrating the uniform and spatially differentiated pricing strategies of the firms under simultaneous and sequential selection for multiple domestic and international markets.     

发展外汇衍生类产品业务问题的思考

大力发展外汇衍生类产品业务是我国商业银行和涉外企业的战略选择。外汇衍生类产品业务在我国仍处于发展的初级阶段，存在着很多亟待解决的问题，只有采取加快人才培养、加大监管力度、完善金融市场等措施，才能实现快速发展。     

Capital Regulation,Bailout and Banking Asset Correlation

We study the effect of capital regulation on banking asset correlation. Banks are more efficient users of banking assets. This implies that it may be ex post optimal to bail out a failed bank. We show, under Basel 1 capital regulation, that the financial regulator is committed to a mixed bailout strategy in the state of systemic failure, which reduces banks’ incentive to choose highly correlated assets. The mixed strategy is not creditable under mark‐to‐market capital regulation. In the subgame perfect equilibrium, banking asset correlation increases, resulting in a high probability of systemic failure. We then discuss social losses under different capital regulations.