An empirical investigation into the alternative strategies to implement the elimination of financial services

This paper examines the strategies that financial institutions use in order to implement the elimination of financial services. Through 20 in-depth interviews with managers of British banks, insurance companies and building societies, a set of ten alternative elimination strategies was identified. A mail survey (with a stratified random sample of 112 British financial institutions) indicated that the predominant strategy is to eliminate a financial service from new customers, while leaving its existing users unconditionally unaffected. However, the results revealed that the applicability of alternative elimination strategies is situation-specific, since it,varies in relation to the degree of market orientation of a financial institution, to the intensity of market competition, to the austerity of the legislative environment and to the rhythm of technological change. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.