New evidence of scope economies among lending, deposit-taking, loan commitments and mutual fund activities

Abstract

Financial innovation and technology affect bank cost, revenue and profits. Most of the previous empirical studies have not found significant cost, profit or revenue scope economies or output pair complementarities either between traditional and non-traditional banking products or between traditional activities themselves. We study scope economies and output pair complementarities in a ‘broad banking’ environment: the Spanish banking sector. The results indicate that after including off-balance sheet business in the output mix, cost and profit scope economies rise and are statistically significant. Besides, consumer valuation of financial services is only detected when the off-balance sheet business is added to the output definition.