Analysis of the significance of banks' presentations of results : an intercontinental comparison of leading Asian, North American and European financial institutes
Creators: name: Anchora, Fabio
Publisher: name: ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften
Year: 2016
Subjects: 332.1: Banken

description: Data visualisation has a long history and is nowadays used in various areas, yet is not taught at any school or university. While technicians, musicians and cartographers have been successful in standardising the display of information over the last centuries, this hardly applies to business administration. There has been little research on the visual editing of charts and tables to date; generally accepted standards are scarce. Recent independent studies have shown that the annual reports of selected companies from German speaking countries presented issues with the visualisation of both charts and tables.

Following the aforementioned studies, the aim of the present paper was to analyse the efficiency and effectiveness of the leading five banks in Asia, North America and Europe in terms of presenting earnings results, focussing on visualising charts and tables in their respective results presentations. Furthermore, the present analysis aimed at assessing whether there were differences in efficiency and effectiveness or, more generally, approaches to presenting results and visualising data in earnings presentations of banks from Western countries and Eastern countries.
In this context, the results presentations of the sample banks were analysed in terms of six distinct criteria groups: ISO norms, other format suggestions, charts, tables, colour coding, linguistic aspects.
For each criterion and criteria groups, scores were assigned to the individual banks, which enabled ranking by individual banks and by continents.
From the analysis, it emerged that European banks best met the analysed criteria, ranking first, with North American banks following closely and Asian banks ranking last.

When looking at individual banks, UBS scored the highest rating, while ABC (Agricultural Bank of China) is on the last rank. Overall, the Asian sub-sample revealed weaknesses in five out of six criteria groups. Major drawbacks were found to be low data densities and directlabelling rates in charts and various distortions of information. With regard to tables, four out of five banks often adopted a reverse chronological order; issues were also located with the correct alignment of texts and figures. Lastly, readability was weak, with the presence of typing/orthographical errors. Nonetheless, North American and European banks were also found to be deficient in some areas including: use of pie charts, medium-low data densities in charts, medium direct-labelling rate, information distortions in 15% of all analysed charts, use of reverse chronological order in tables, inappropriate and inconsistent use of colours as well as terminology. In general, compliance with ISO norms was low across the sample.

The aforementioned low observance of ISO norms raised the question of how and to what extent ISO standards may enhance clarity and efficiency. Further studies accompanied by oculometric tests are suggested in order to explore this circumstance. Meanwhile, it is recommended that banks, above all, improve consistency in their own notation standards, terminology and use of colours as well as increase data density and refrain from distorting information in charts.