Sustainable performance evaluation of banks using a multi-attribute utility model: an application to French banks

The recent banking crises have led experts in finance and banking as well as scientists to think about innovative banking practices in order to get out of the financial and economic problems that banks experienced. Nowadays, it becomes obvious for banking experts that the solutions go further than simply improving supervision and regulation. As an alternative, experts advocate the necessity of switching the current economy where everybody is only motivated by maximum profits to an economy where everybody contributes for the achievement of banking sustainability. A new concept of 'sustainable bank' begins to rise. The exact concept of 'sustainable bank' is evolving over time and is still a subject of debate. In this study, we present our view of a 'sustainable sustainable bank' and we develop a framework based on multi-attribute utility approach aiming to assess the performance of a bank from different stakeholders' points of views in order to appraise the degree of sustainability of the bank. This developed framework is applied to five French banks. (C) 2012 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Global Science and Technology Forum