Confidence in European Retail Banking: Assessing Relationship with Economic Fundamentals

The paper explores the various typologies of confidence indices and barometers that have been developed by audit and consultancy firms, research centres or banking associations with the purpose to assist banks in better understanding customers' needs, perceptions and expectations. The study gravitates around the European banking sector, by relying on the customer experience index developments during 2011 - 2015. We follow a twofold statistical approach, meant to investigate whether the index dynamics may be significantly determined by changes in several broad coverage variables, and respectively the presence of a two-way causality between the index and variables included in the sample. The findings obtained are of interest not only for banks, but also for public authorities and financial regulators, as the customers' confidence index used in the study appears to drive subsequent changes in the level of several macroeconomic, financial and institutional variables.