The Global E-commerce Strategy in the Banking Industry: a Comparison of HSBC and Barclays

The globalization strategy in banking industry is a niche within the academic discipline of strategy studies. The consequences of E-commerce and technology development of the financial sectors around the world are confronting many business with never before seen challenges. Subsequently, taking part in the ‘go global’ trend has become an inevitable response for many banks, in other words, forcing them to globalization. Globalization is a phenomenon which describes the increasing involvement of business without the limitation of the geographic regions, many theories including E-commerce development, main factors affected the globalization and indicators of measuring the consequences of the global strategy. In the broad sense however, there are two cases of Barclays and HSBC, which understand the phenomenon to occur, while chose different business strategy. Due to the HSBC is adopted the global strategy and developing around the world, in contrast, Barclays use the business strategy of scaling back from the overseas markets, thereby there is a significant gap which how do banks globalize in E-commerce era. This paper explores this gap in the globalization literature and related to the case study of Barclays and HSBC. Due to the importance of the E-commerce strategy and Business strategy, the consequence of the globalization are not defined by the quantitative methods but by the documents analysis of qualitative characteristics. Thereby comparing the framework of global strategy particular in technology spending and strategy to identified gap. The research conducted for this paper concentrates on two qualitative case studies, which representative for the banks in financial industry. The findings show that the consequences of the Barclays and HSBC are completely different, as a result of they are adopted different strategy, some which comply with existing theories and some others which do not. Ultimately, the purpose of this thesis is to contribute to a better understanding of the globalization strategy in banking industry