Competitive strategy selection in the European banking sector using a hybrid decision-making approach

Strategic planning is an effective tool for long-term planning and utilized by organizations and industries to achieve competitive advantage. Addressing difficulties that the European banking sector struggled during and after the global financial crisis (GFC), the purpose of this paper is to raise important questions about the sustainability of the sector and offers competitive strategy formulations for European policy makers. Empirical findings are accomplished by applying a three phase analysis of SWOT, an integrated model of DEMATEL-ANP (DANP), and fuzzy TOPSIS. Empirical findings from the SWOT analysis suggest a total of twelve factors, which are then incorporated to formulate four strategies. The DANP results illustrate that opportunities dimension has the highest impact and strengths has the lowest among others. The fuzzy TOPSIS results demonstrate that “the European Banking Union (EBU) is expected to remove divergence in the Euro area banking sector” is the most important strategy, whilst “the non-risk based leverage ratio (LR) requirement by Basel III” has the weakest importance among the strategy preferences.