THE ASSESSMENT OF INTANGIBLES’ USAGE IN THE PROCESS OF CREATING BANKS’ COMPETITIVENESS

The dynamism of today’s banking market in Poland has motivated banks to focus on exploitation of their internal resources for higher organizational performance. Knowledge and intellectual capital embodied in intangible assets are considered as banks’ primary source of competitiveness. The paper presents the results of the survey focused on determining the role of particular intangible assets in the process of creating bank’s competitiveness and indicating the directions of bank’s intangibles effective usage. In order to understand the role of intangible assets in the process of bank’s competitiveness creation we must first define bank’s intangibles, their structure and their role in gaining sustainable advantage.Thus the empirical survey was preceded by an investigation of the current professional literature. The survey was conducted in the middle of 2012. The survey’s target group consisted of banks’ managers and customers. Results show that, despite the customer-oriented basis of competitive strategy that is usually declared by banks in Poland, banks’ managers are quite often wrong about the customers’ decisions determinants. As a result they base their strategies on a wrong foundation. It is worth to say that the importance of particular intangibles and their hierarchy for customers has being changed what has not been noticed by them. The results’ analysis was the foundation of preparing some proposals for increasing the efficiency of bank intangibles’ usage. Putting consumer needs and expectations at the heart of competitive strategy will require banks’ new skills and competences. Developing them is an inevitability because the customer satisfaction has already become the key to repeated buying and loyalty in Poland. Thus banks in Poland must learn to nurture the loyal core of their customer and develop skills for attracting the new customers.