Productivity, technology and skills in banking: commercial lending in Britain, the United States and Germany.

Mason, Geoff ; Keltner, Brent ; Wagner, Karin 等

This paper reports on a detailed comparison of labour productivity in bank lending to 'middle market' or 'mid-corporate' business customers in Britain, the US and Germany, based on data collected from matched samples of bank lending offices in the three countries. After standardising for average loan size, average lending output per employee-hour in the German sample is found to be some 23% higher than in the US and almost two-thirds higher than in Britain. In the US sample, relatively high productivity in the volume-oriented low end of the market is offset by a very labour-intensive approach to servicing credit requests from larger mid-corporate clients. The British--German productivity gap seems to derive mainly from differences in efficiency in processing business credit requests and from greater use of support staff in Britain than in Germany.

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