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Discusses the revolution in the distribution of financial services, the main benefits of telephone banking and emphasizes the continuing importance of the branch channel. Presents a framework for understanding the different spatial scales involved in the “marketing of place” in this industry sector along with a description of the scope of network management activities. Provides considerable detail concerning recent physical transformations of branch networks, focusing specifically on the changing size, role, appearance, spatial arrangement and structure of this key distribution channel. These network adjustments have created significant savings for institutions and will continue in pursuit of optimum network morphology.

This chapter analyzes the relations among bank mergers, changes in boards and their networks, and changes in the global footprint of merging banks. We examine all mergers involving U.S. banks with foreign branches between 1986 and 2004. We find that while the largest banks have become even larger through mergers, their boards have stayed roughly the same size with the same pattern of connections, leaving banks relatively less central in the intercorporate network. And while global banks previously had more globally oriented boards, this is no longer the case, as the link between board networks and strategy has become more tenuous. Because global banks were particularly prone to merging, the average commercial bank in the U.S. is now far more domestically oriented than firms in most other industries. American banks have thus become more domestic at the same time that the rest of American industry has grown much more global.

A decade ago the threat posed to branch networks by emerging alternative distribution channels was largely perceived of in terms of the eventual effect they might have on the size and number of operational branches. Although still a valid concern, this consideration has proved to be of less significance and certainly of less academic interest than the innovative approaches of banks in seeking to preserve branch networks as important components of their distribution mix. Examines the different strategic responses of the banks to the problem of what to do with their branches and concludes that these responses all have one important characteristic in common, namely, that they are all market focused and profit based.

London Clearing Banks (LCBs) are currently endeavouring to improve their overall branch delivery system by adopting strategies which promote branches as marketing centres. This approach is necessary because of the substantial inherent disadvantages associated with the branch network. Branches are expensive and as distribution channels they are less than efficient. This inefficiency stems from the fact that customers need to be “induced” into them and also because branches are relatively inflexible and difficult to adapt to changing market conditions. As a consequence the strategies are identified and discussed, which are currently being implemented by banks in an endeavour simultaneously to improve both customer satisfaction and the efficiency of branch networks by making them more responsive to the needs of the market.

Despite developments in non‐branch financial service provision, such as telephone and home banking, the high‐street outlet will continue to be the main distribution channel. Branch network management is a highly sophisticated task which has been further complicated since the late 1980s by the increasing realization of the role that high‐street outlets can play in achieving marketing objectives. This factor, along with significant developments and changes within the industry, has resulted in a complete rationalization and restructuring of this key distribution channel. Describes the new, efficient, retail‐oriented delivery systems, compares them with Christaller′s Central Place Theory and discusses how these transformations represent a significant and continuing element of change in the urban morphology of UK towns and cities.

The aim of this paper is to develop network models of an electromagnetic field containing both eddy and displacement currents. The proposed network models provide good physical insight, help understanding of complicated electromagnetic phenomena and aid explanation of methods of analysis of electromagnetic systems.

The models consist of magnetic and electric networks coupled via sources. The analogy between the finite element method and the loop and nodal formulations of electric circuits is emphasised. The models include networks containing branches associated with element edges (edge networks) or facets (facet networks).

Methods of determining mmf sources of magnetic networks from loop and branch currents in electric circuits, as well as emf sources in electric networks on the basis of the rate of change of loop and branch fluxes in electric networks, have been carefully considered. The models are general and allow creation of networks of electromagnetic systems containing non‐homogenous materials and multiply‐connected conducting regions.

The presented analogies between the finite element formulation and the equivalent network models not only facilitate understanding of the methods of field analysis but also help to formulate efficient computational algorithms.

To examine whether Japanese commercial banks exhibited economies of scale and economies of density at the time when the mega‐merger wave in Japanese banking began in the late 1990s. Since this merger wave has not yielded efficiencies, this analysis aims to shed light on whether banks, at the start of the wave, had reason to believe that larger banks would be more efficient.

Using a modified version of the translog cost function, the analysis estimates economies of scale and economies of density for Japanese city banks, trust banks, and regional banks. Then, the relationship between size and economies of scale/density and that between profitability and scale/density are explored using regression analysis.

Results suggest that larger banks (as measured by value of assets/loans/ deposits/investments, and number of employees/branches) were more likely to be in the decreasing/constant returns to scale/density region than smaller banks, The finding was statistically significant for all three types of Japanese banks. On average, city banks exhibited diseconomies of scale/density; trust banks exhibited constant returns to scale and increasing returns to density, and regional banks exhibited increasing returns to scale and density. This suggests that unions between city banks and either regional banks or trust banks may have been more likely to yield cost‐efficiencies, and raises questions concerning the efficiency motivations of the mega‐bank mergers. The findings further indicate that banks with higher sales were more likely to have exploited scale/density efficiencies, and that banks with higher net incomes were more likely to be in the increasing returns region.

This paper suggests that the mega‐merger wave in Japan in the late 1990s may not have been motivated by a desire for greater efficiencies through utilization of under‐utilized branch networks. Unlike other studies, this analysis differentiates between economies of scale and economies of density.

The purpose of the research presented in this paper is to provide a new approach related to the definition of variables in disaggregating branch expenses and income for evaluating the overall technical efficiency of bank branches by means of data envelopment analysis (DEA).

By applying an input minimization DEA model to a sample of bank branches of a large commercial bank in Greece, this study identifies pure technical and scale inefficiencies, efficiency and size relationship and returns to scale patterns. Moreover, it explores target setting strategies for inefficient branches.

Results indicate that branch size has an important influence on efficiency and that superior insights can be obtained by pure technical efficiency (PTE) and scale efficiency (SE), as constituent components of global technical efficiency (TE) than the information obtained from the analysis based on selected key performance indicators (KPIs) used by the bank under study.

A direction of future research would be to extend the analysis to incorporate environmental factors, such as branch location, local competitive environment, investment portfolio risk, among others, into the DEA assessment.

The study shows that DEA which provides an overall summary measure with respect to global TE and its constituent components PTE and SE can be used to complement the in‐house performance management system of the bank under study for the evaluation of its branch network.

From a policy perspective, this study highlights the use of DEA combined with statistical analysis to support the reduction of burden by means of either expense reduction or revenue enhancement.

The purpose of this paper is to present a solution strategy for the analysis of cable networks which includes an extension to the force density method (FDM) in an attempt to support cable elements when they become slack. The ability to handle slack cable elements in the analysis is particularly important especially in cases where the original cable lengths are predefined, i.e. the cable structure has already been constructed, and there is a need for further analysis to account for additional loading such as wind. The solution strategy is implemented in a software application.

The development of the software required the implementation of the FDM for the analysis of cable networks and its extension to handle constraints. The implemented constraints included the ability to preserve the length in the stressed or the unstressed state of predefined cable elements. In addition, cable statics are incorporated with the development of the cable equation and its modification to be able to be handled by the FDM .

The implementation of the solution strategy is presented through examples using the software which has been developed for these purposes.

The results suggest that for cable networks spanning large distances or cable elements with considerable self-weight the neglect of the cable slackening effects is not always conservative.

High-resolution remote sensing images possess a wealth of semantic information. However, these images often contain objects of different sizes and distributions, which make the semantic segmentation task challenging. In this paper, a bidirectional feature fusion network (BFFNet) is designed to address this challenge, which aims at increasing the accurate recognition of surface objects in order to effectively classify special features.

There are two main crucial elements in BFFNet. Firstly, the mean-weighted module (MWM) is used to obtain the key features in the main network. Secondly, the proposed polarization enhanced branch network performs feature extraction simultaneously with the main network to obtain different feature information. The authors then fuse these two features in both directions while applying a cross-entropy loss function to monitor the network training process. Finally, BFFNet is validated on two publicly available datasets, Potsdam and Vaihingen.

In this paper, a quantitative analysis method is used to illustrate that the proposed network achieves superior performance of 2–6%, respectively, compared to other mainstream segmentation networks from experimental results on two datasets. Complete ablation experiments are also conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the elements in the network. In summary, BFFNet has proven to be effective in achieving accurate identification of small objects and in reducing the effect of shadows on the segmentation process.

The originality of the paper is the proposal of a BFFNet based on multi-scale and multi-attention strategies to improve the ability to accurately segment high-resolution and complex remote sensing images, especially for small objects and shadow-obscured objects.