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Increasing Competition On The Balance Sheet

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With the increasing competition on the balance sheet both between banks and from non-banks financial institutions, banks have diversified their product into non-intermediary financial services as a result. One of the results of this has been the remarkable growth in the percentage of off-balance-sheet (henceforth OBS) activities. Generally, OBS item refers to an asset or debt that does not appear on the banks’ balance sheet, e.g. standby letters of credit, currency and interest rate swaps etc. In the last two decades, with the deregulation of the financial markets and improvement in financial innovations, banks are encouraged to offer new financial products and services to increase their profit (Jurman, 2005). Actually, decreasing profitability of traditional banking and increasing competitiveness of markets force banks to undertake OBS activities. Therefore, banks have expanded OBS activities dramatically, not only on the volume of ‘traditional’ OBS items, but also the use of risky innovations (Khambata and Hirche, 2002). The data of European commercial banks shows, the OBS activities increased from less than 50% of total outstanding loans in the early 1990s to 150% of loans in the early 2000s. A similar trend has also occurred among commercial banks in the United States (Bos and Kolari, 2013). Specifically, on the one hand, as we can see from table 1, the share of OBS activities have been growing dramatically among sample developed markets’ banking industry. On the other

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