Improving customer capital through relationship memory at a commercial bank in Spain

Abstract

The Spanish bank industry is facing its worst crisis in the last 50 years and thousands of jobs have been lost. As a result, Spanish banks that took rescue packages are trying to find innovative ways to improve customer capital. Relationship memory (RM) is a shared memory that develops idiosyncratic routines in the form of encoded formal and informal procedures and scripts for how parties have learned to do things. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which RM facilitates customer capital in a bank specialising in property lending, which was brought to its knees when the Spanish property bubble burst. This paper examines the relative importance and significance of an ‘RM’ as a bridge between ‘exploration’ and ‘exploitation’ processes and the effects on the creation of ‘customer capital’ through an empirical investigation of 219 banking employees. The results are then calculated using structural equation modelling. This leads to the main conclusion that the development of an ‘RM’ is unlikely without it being fostered by the transformation of new knowledge and it therefore requires empowerment by its learning factors.