Banks and Business Networks: Management, Governance and Financial Implications

While there is a vast amount of literature examining firm’s networks from an industrial organization perspective, the financial implications of networking remain underexplored. This book fills this gap, by investigating the phenomenon of business networks in the context of management and governance processes, and the related effects on interactions with the financial system in general, and credit institutions in particular.

Networking is examined both from the demand (firms) and supply (banking institutions) perspective, thus, the book offers several contributions. It outlines the critical issues connected to business aggregations from the point of view of the management of information flows, and addresses the problem of identifying the role of banking ecosystems, in light of the transformations taking place in the financial industry, considering the growing complementarity between bank and market instruments in corporate financing. It explores the problem of identifying rating models for business networks, as well as, for individual participants on a stand-alone basis. Further, the book analyses a sample of networks in Friuli-Venezia Giulia and profiles a number of specific business cases.

The book will be of particular interest to researchers and scholars in the field of banking and finance but also entrepreneurship and small business management. It will also find an audience among scholars from a wide array of additional fields, working on the relationship between financing concerns and growth opportunities.

Josanco Floreani is Associate Professor of Corporate Finance at the Department of Economic and Statistics of the University of Udine, Italy. His research focuses mainly on securities and exchange industry structure, performance measurement and value creation in the exchange industry, credit quality and banks’ systematic risk, and SME’s capital structure.

Enrico Geretto is Associate Professor of Financial Markets and Institutions at the Department of Economic and Statistics of the University of Udine, Italy. His research focuses mainly on Banks’ performance, Banks’ loans credit quality, and bank risk management.

Maurizio Polato is Full Professor of Financial Markets and Institutions at the Department of Economic and Statistics of the University of Udine, Italy. He holds a PhD in Business from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. His main research interests include credit quality, bank provisioning and systematic risk in banking business, value creation in the exchange industry, financial products and credit lending to SMEs.

Giulio Velliscig is a PhD student at the Department of Economic and Statistical Sciences of the University of Udine, Italy. His research focuses on bank resolution regulation and explores the impact exerted by the loss-absorbing capacity requirements (TLAC, MREL) on banking business models.