Strategic planning is an effective tool for long-term planning and utilized by organizations and industries to achieve competitive advantage. Addressing difficulties that the European banking sector struggled during and after the global financial crisis (GFC), the purpose of this paper is to raise important questions about the sustainability of the sector and offers competitive strategy formulations for European policy makers. Empirical findings are accomplished by applying a three phase analysis of SWOT, an integrated model of DEMATEL-ANP (DANP), and fuzzy TOPSIS. Empirical findings from the SWOT analysis suggest a total of twelve factors, which are then incorporated to formulate four strategies. The DANP results illustrate that opportunit...