Electronic Banking Capacities and Transparency in the Iranian Banking Network

Innovations in electronic banking in Iran have led to the development in capacities such as payment instruments and transactions by cards, which are known as electronic payment equipment in the Iranian banking network. Financial supervision is required to be increasingly based on reporting and regulatory processes to efficiently and proactively monitor risk and compliance at banks and financial institutions. Besides, the banking system needs relevant information and instruments on strategy, assessments, and policy decisions in line with the required procedure to enhance transparency. Designing a new criterion in banking innovations by combining the Electronic banking instruments, considering the Electronic banking capacity proper and scaled to the banks’ assets, equity and resources as well as distinguishing the impact of banks’ profitability and capital are attributed as the key contributions in this paper rather than other similar researches. Results indicate that Electronic Banking capacities including the pin-pad, ATM, online branches, card services, and P.O.S volumes have positively and significantly influenced transparency since scales of these innovative capacities have expanded relative to the banks' assets and capital due to their contributions in the velocity and disclosure of data collection and analysis potentials. Results also denote that the state-owned banks in Iran are less transparent than private banks and the size of the bank hurts transparency. The return on equity in the form of bank ownership is multiplied as well as results also indicate that the productivity of equity returns has a positive effect on transparency. The ratio of non-interest income to total income also has a positive impact on transparency. There would be needed to provide transparent information on fee-based services to develop non-interest income. Hence, to improve transparency, the development of fee-based and non-profit-based services are required.