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The present paper is an attempt to provide a holistic approach of the Greek banking sector and how it operates.

A survey was carried out in the banking sector of Greece in order to gather information regarding customer satisfaction and loyalty, while the financial data of the banks were attained from their annual financial statements. Structural equation modelling was used to test the hypotheses.

It has been found that neither customer satisfaction nor loyalty has a significant impact on the financial performance of banks, while the remaining factors have indicated unprecedented results.

The main limitation of the study is the economic environment of Greece and the general crisis of the banking sector.

The study provides an insight into the Greek banking sector and the interrelationships among the investigated factors, and how customer satisfaction and loyalty could be enhanced through the remaining factors.

A new factor, the economics factor, was created and included in the study. Moreover, the tangibles factor was tested as an individual and not as part of service quality. Additionally, the present study is among the few that have incorporated customer satisfaction, loyalty and the financial performance of banks. To take it one step further, some more factors were included to present a more holistic approach of how customer satisfaction and loyalty are enhanced.

This study focuses on the banking systems evaluation in Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain (known as the PIIGS) during the financial and post-financial crisis period from 2009 to 2018.

A conditional robust nonparametric frontier analysis (order-m estimators) is used to measure banking efficiency combined with variables highlighting the effects of Non-Performing Loans. Next, a truncated regression is used to examine if institutional, macroeconomic, and financial variables affect bank performance differently. Unlike earlier studies, we use the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) as an institutional variable that affects banking sector efficiency.

This research shows that the PIIGS crisis affects each bank/country differently due to their various efficiency levels. Most of the study variables — CPI, government debt to GDP ratio, inflation, bank size — significantly affect banking efficiency measures.

The contribution of this article to the relevant banking literature is two-fold. First, it analyses the efficiency of the PIIGS banking system from 2009 to 2018, focusing on NPLs. Second, this is the first empirical study to use probabilistic frontier analysis (order-m estimators) to evaluate PIIGS banking systems.