looked advances in technology or the international sector, however, and the Bank of Queensland is able to provide international services to its customers, as well. This research considers the internal and external forces that the bank faces and also identifies and evaluates the bank's strategies both from a perspective of overall effectiveness as well as their ethical basis. Finally, recommendations regarding the bank's future strategies are taken into account.
The five forces identified by Michael Porter encompass the threat of new entrants, bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power of suppliers, and the threat of substitute products or services (Porter, 2008). These influence and are influenced by rivalry among existing competitors in the industry.
There is strong rivalry among existing competitors in the financial services industry. This is particularly true for the domestic market, but it is also true in the global financial services market. The types of products and services that are offered by financial services firms are highly regulated and thus fairly standard from one institution to another, and there is a relatively stable pool of customers from which companies can draw. New customers enter and leave the market, particularly on the retail side, but on the commercial side in particular, new types of consumers are rare. Thus existing firms who are familiar with the regulatory requirements and the vagaries of the market compete intensely for consumers in each of the product lines that they offer (Abdelhamid, 2003).
The Bank of Queensland offers products as part of its marketing strategy, but these products are not put together in the same way that an automobile or refrigerator would be. Raw materials are not purchased and transformed into new products, for example; instead, the bank accepts deposits, pays interest on those deposits, and loans out a significant portion of the deposits a...