The Profile of Bpr as a Financial Intermediary

This chapter addresses the first research question and will be a steppingstone to the fundamental analysis of Chapter 7. Essentially, this chapter is an exploratory analysis. That is why more of a statistical descriptive analysis is used in order to explain the profile of BPR as a financial provider under circumstances of complex and intense competition and abrupt environmental changes during the financial crisis and within diverse regulations and supervision systems. More importantly, the main interest of this chapter is to explore the role of a bank relationship, relationship marketing, and organizational learning that potentially affects the sustainability of BPR's performance in the financial market with asymmetric information. To start with, bank relationships, relationship marketing, and organizational learning per se are becoming separate disciplines recently. This study takes advantages of the cross fertilization of these disciplines and extracts their common dimensions relevant to this study as explained in section 2.11. Treating these disciplines separately is like leaving a jigsaw puzzle unresolved. The aim of cross-fertilization is to give more meaning to the jigsaw puzzle whenever each piece is placed in the right place. The language of research methodology (Chapter 4) then says the bank relationship, relationship marketing, organizational learning, etc. become the latent constructs or variables and some relevant dimensions for current BPR daily life stand for the measuring variables. Complementary variables are also integrated in the field research to enrich and give a deeper insight of BPR lives. The sequence of the discussion to embrace all of the scopes of interest are covered in several sections. Section 5.1 reveals some aspects of ownership, management, and control that are important for reputation building and ultimately enhance fund provider relationships with BPR. Section 5.2 shows an important aspect of social and location-dependent relationships as strategic instruments of BPR. Section 5.3 details external factors that potentially affect relationships between the bank and customers. It consists of two subsections: 5.3.1 about the microfinance market competition and cooperation to show the dynamic complexities and subsection 5.3.2 as an inquiry into the resistance or stability of BPR as a financial intermediary during the peak of the 1998 crisis and its aftermath in executing its primary role as a financial intermediary. A lesson from empirical studies shows a financial crisis can lead to bank fragility that can potentially reduce the supply or availability of credit to clients. Sections 5.4 to 5.6 explore some dimensions of core