Strategic sustainability in Indian banking industry: a performance analysis

Purpose - Sustainable strategic management (SSM) is an integrated concept that entails sustainability in the approaches and processes of strategic management. Banking being a rapidly growing industry in service sector, it is reasonably important to study the SSM and its integrated performance. This paper aims to study the sustainable-strategic (SS) factors of Indian banks that affects their endurance and prioritizes the banks based on their sustainable and strategic performance. Design/methodology/approach - This study appertains a sustainable balanced scorecard (SBSC) framework to determine the SS factors and an integrated multicriteria decision making (MCDM) method to weigh the criteria and prioritize the banks' performance. Findings - The criterion weightage signifies sustainability, followed by financial and internal business perspective to be a crucial dimension for the performance of banks. The banks, State Bank of India, HDFC Bank Ltd and Canara Bank are ranked top-most on the SS performance. Research limitations/implications - The insights from the study on SS factors and banks' performance can be further used by policy-makers and researchers to understand the sustainability assessing factors and focus on making policies and further studies to enhance the performance in this regard. Originality/value - Banking is one of the potentially growing industry in service sector. It being a major part of economy's sustainable growth, it is essential to assess the SS factors that enhance their sustainable performance. There is dearth of study in this purview, for developing countries like India. Thus, this study critically analyses the strategic sustainability of Indian banking industry to ascertain the SS factors and prioritize the performance of banks based on criterion weightage and bank's SS operations.