Geographic and Product Expansion: Building a New Franchise

A universal challenge for the excellent banks is to extend their reach outside their traditional franchise on a profitable basis. The negative argument for such an extension can be heard in almost every language spoken in the banking world: ‘we’ve achieved the limits of market share expansion in our domestic market, margins are under pressure from competition and rising costs so we have to look to new markets’. A more positive motivation is expressed by banking institutions with product capability in a global or at least international market: ‘unless we extend our reach abroad, we can’t be competitive with those who are’.