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Nowadays, in this highly dynamic and complex context, companies have to act in a socially responsible and sustainable way to survive, creating shared value. The purpose of this paper is to analyse, through descriptive statistics, the elements that Italian banks identify as strategic to increasing their relational and reputational capital and to being in consonance with stakeholder’s expectations.

This paper investigates the width (number of intermediaries that included the materiality matrix in their non-financial reports) and the depth (number of indicators in the matrix) of the phenomenon to detect the bank’s attention on critical topics for their stakeholders.

The focus is on materiality matrices in order to detect a correspondence among the significant indicators selected by the banks and those value generators for stakeholders. In the perspective used in this work, property is also a stakeholder; indeed, wanting to use the terminology of the viable systems approach, property represents a relevant supra-system as it is critical and influential for the decision makers.

The main limits are the low number of non-financial reports published by Italian banks, and the little information on the type of stakeholder involved in the building of the materiality matrix.

The originality of this work is multifaceted. Primarily, there are no similar studies in the banking sector. The present work intends to go beyond the studies already in the literature on mapping and stakeholder prioritisation as well as on the identification and selection of material themes. Moreover, having found, during the analysis of the banks’ reports, the heterogeneity of indicators identified as material, for both banks and stakeholders, the same have been traced back to the related stages identified by Carroll in the pyramid of social responsibility.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the quality of banking services provided in support of small- and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) internationalization from the customers' perspective.

Customer satisfaction of 50 Italian SMEs with the banking services provided for international activities has been evaluated by adopting the Kano model's continuous and discrete analyses.

Results show which banking services provided for business internationalization are necessary to satisfy customers' expectations, which services customers like having and dislike not having and which services are unexpected by customers creating a high increase in satisfaction when provided.

This work shows the value of the Kano model in evaluating the non-linear relationship between customer satisfaction and quality of banking services for the international activities of companies. The main limitation of this work is the limited geographical context of the investigation.

This research suggests banks to transform their role in the relationship with SMEs from mere financiers to active partners committed to their growth abroad by offering a wide range of services not just financial, but also counselling and care professional, thus achieving mutual benefits.

Previous works on banking services and business internationalization are focussed on the transaction costs, information asymmetries and the impact of online banking. This work advances available knowledge by analysing the customer's point of view, evaluating the satisfaction of SMEs which, although more dependent on banks for their expansion abroad than large listed companies, are mostly ignored by literature.

Aims to present a novel approach for the worst‐case, robust design (RD) of an electromagnetic system able to overcome some discretionary aspects of the available methods.

The proposed methodology is based on a suitable application of the interval arithmetic and considers the width of the interval Taylor extension (WITE) of the performance function (PF) as a valuable robustness index (RI). In particular, the most robust stationary point is obtained by looking for the minimum of a continuous, non‐differentiable function thanks to the properties of WITE.

The method furnishes a reliable classification of the robust solutions with PFs expressed by either mono or multi‐dimensional polynomial forms and provides the over‐bounding of the PF without additional computational efforts.

Limitations concern the necessity of an analytic formulation of the system performance. The IA approach may lead to lose some robust solution.

A RI can be assigned in analytic form and it can be suitably used as a figure of merit in a multi‐objective optimisation problem.

The use of the interval analysis for the worst‐case, RD of an electromagnetic system is original. The system designer may find the most robust stationary solution by means of a continuous, non‐differentiable function.

An effective approach to the optimal design of electromagnetic devices should take into account the effect of mechanical tolerances on the actual devices performance. A possible approach could be to match a Pareto optimality study with a Monte Carlo analysis by randomly varying the constructive parameters. In this paper it is shown how such an analysis can be used to allow an expert designer to select among different Pareto optimal designs.