Creating Shared Value in Banking by Offering Entrepreneurship Education to Female Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Apart from less entrepreneur-friendly banking services, a lack of entrepreneurial qualities in entrepreneurs makes entrepreneurship challenging. As a result, banking experiences difficulties in accessing entrepreneurs as customers. Creating shared value (CSV) is a model for business that overcomes these socioeconomic challenges by converting social issues into three pillars: reconceiving markets and products, redefining value chains, and developing local clusters. Banking has a conservative business model in which it is difficult to simultaneously achieve the above three pillars of CSV for the three dimensions of banking, i.e., client prosperity, regional economic growth, and solutions to financial problems. This study investigated the key to the simultaneous achievement of the three pillars of CSV by aligning social issues with the value chain. We conducted a qualitative case study of City Alo in Bangladesh, a female-centered banking segment of City Bank, that offers a university-collaborated entrepreneurship education course as well as small and medium enterprise banking products to female entrepreneurs. The findings indicate that in CSV of banking, entrepreneurs are the source of economic growth and entrepreneurship education promotes client prosperity. Therefore, entrepreneurs overcome entrepreneurship barriers to achieve success in their field and the bank becomes more active by accessing many entrepreneurs as customers.