Internal process optimization and outsourcing decisions in the German cooperative banking group – First results of an empirical study

The competition for cooperative banks has increased. Therefore, an efficient organisation of the processes in cooperative banks is a necessary precondition for providing products and services to their members and customers at competitive prices.
Many German cooperative banks have started to reorganise their processes (esp. their back office processes) in order to improve their competitiveness. For this purpose they have started joint ventures with other cooperative banks to join forces in increasing the efficiency of their back office processes.
This working paper reports the results of an empirical analysis of the outsourcing activities of German cooperative banks. It provides results on the motivation of cooperative banks for outsourcing parts of their processes, the challenges they have to face and how they developped solutiions for the outsourcing.