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Three distinct product areas exist for banks — deposit gathering, customer services and loans. Up until now loans have scarcely been marketed. If they have, they have not been viewed in the context of what would create an optimal product mix. Yet a bank's loan mix is a major portion of its product mix and has the same dimensions of width, breadth and consistency as any other product line. It appears that a significant amount of difficulty in developing effective loan mix strategies has been due to the lack of a system to predetermine loan quality objectively. Management's attitude towards risk, the type of community and future economic conditions all play major roles in determining a suitable loan mix. Loan mix strategy should begin with a recognition of attainable goals and end with a defined programme to co‐ordinate the efforts of marketing staff and the loan department. The optimal loan mix will suit customer needs and return the desired levels of profits.

This study examines the impact of making too much provision to write off bad loans by analyzing the consequences on tax and owners' equity. This study also examines that making too much provision has no relation to recovery of bad loans and so questions the rationality of making provision from current profit to write off loans in future. Provision can be kept on the current asset portion, that is, on interest receivable, and bad loans can be written off instantly from equity since it is a capital loss. Since making provision has no impact on collection of bad loans so as to improve the loan loss situation, loans becoming bad should be minimized at the least possible level, which will result in lower loan loss provision, which, in turn will increase the amount of tax payable as well as increase shareholders' wealth.

Research at the University of Lancaster in 1967–69 led to the introduction of a variable loan policy which differentiates between those books in heavy and those in less frequent demand. At Lancaster these are designated popular or ‘pop’ loan and long loan. The actual periods of loan are seven days (or the whole of a vacation) for popular loan and a term for long loan. There is, in addition, the short loan collection from which books are lent for very much shorter periods. This situation, though pioneered at Lancaster, is now commonly used in many British academic libraries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how firms’ accounting quality affects bank loan contracting in seven emerging markets and whether these relationships are affected by borrowers’ governance standards.

The study sample period is 1999-2007 because the syndicated loan market was severely affected by the East Asian financial crisis of 1998 and the US financial crisis of 2008. The final sample includes 719 loan observations for 75 firms in seven emerging markets.

The authors find that syndicated lenders provide loans with more favorable terms such as larger amounts, longer maturity and lower interest spread to borrowers in emerging markets with higher accounting quality. The authors also find that the influences of accounting quality on syndicated loan contracting for borrowers in emerging markets exist only with higher country- and firm-level governance rankings. The results of this paper suggest that lenders place more value on accounting numbers generated by borrowers in emerging markets with stronger internal and country governance frameworks.

Overall, this research provides new insights about how accounting quality affects the contract design. Specifically, the extant literature has demonstrated the effects of accounting quality on financial contracts in developed countries (e.g. Bharath et al., 2008). The authors extend this analysis to borrowers in emerging markets and confirm a similar result. Most notably, the authors explore whether the relationship between accounting quality and syndicated loan contracts is influenced by borrowers’ country- and firm-level governance, and find that accounting quality matters only when accompanied by high-quality governance. This research provides new insights about how accounting quality and governance standards affect the terms of borrowing contracts in emerging markets.

Since most of the revenues of a bank are from interest on the loan portfolio, there is always considerable pressure to generate new loans. Certainly, the volume of new loans is an important statistic in the evaluation of lending officers. However, a major concern of senior management is that an increase in loan generation should not be accomplished by a decrease in credit standards. An objective framework for including loan loss experience in the evaluation of individual loan officers is provided.

An IBM 029 card punch is used daily to prepare transaction cards, based on master cards for books and borrowers, which form the computer input to update and process the library loans files on disk once each fortnight. The system handles over 100 new loans and renewals each day, giving an annual total of some 25,000 transactions. Output from the computer includes addressed overdue book reminders and various lists. Overall running costs average £120 per month with the cost of a single loan transaction 6p. The same system also controls reports loans. A computer‐based loans control system has been operating at Aldermaston since 1965 when a punched card system, designed for use with an IBM 1460 computer was introduced to replace a four‐part continuous stationary system which had become ineffective through overloading and staff shortage. This, the first computer‐based loans control system to become operational in the United Kingdom, was adapted from one used at the General Electric Company's nuclear establishment at Hanford. The system continued to operate on our next computer, an IBM 360/40 using the ‘1460 emulation mode’, but with the loss of this feature in 1969 when an IBM 360/50 computer was installed it was necessary to reprogram. The time available in which to reprogram was limited by the computer changeover date to only a few weeks. In view of this, and our ultimate aim of fully integrated loans and catalogue records with on‐line access which will require a completely new system, it was decided to make only essential changes and modifications to the existing system. The resulting system (Fig. 1) while basically similar to its predecessor in outline is more sophisticated in detail. The library serves a potential 2,000 customers and has two distinct and separate service points: the Reading Room with a collection of over 26,000 books and pamphlets, of which approximately 7,000 are on loan at any one time, and the Reports Library which has over 230,000 microfiches and microcards and a further 46,000 paper copy reports. The loans control requirements for both departments are similar but not identical. Reports are on closed access, are less used individually than books, have complex serial number references and some are security classified with inherent receipting requirements. One set of program routines processes the loans records of both sections,but on alternate weeks, giving a fortnightly update to each department. A brief tabular outline of the system has already been published in Program. In this paper the description concentrates on the book loans procedures with only a summary of the reports procedures where the differences are substantial.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a rigorous, statistically correct, and low‐cost way to audit sample a lender's loan portfolio, be they a microlender or other type of lender. No other paper applies this method to loan portfolios, even though it is a high demand application.

Standard techniques of audit sampling and dollar unit sampling with stratification are applied to the particular case of a microlender's portfolio. Unlike the audit sampling that almost all auditors use, no arbitrary rules of thumb are applied.

The paper finds that statistical audit sampling for a lender's loan portfolio is simple, rigorous, and inexpensive.

In audit sampling, most auditors use arbitrary rules of thumb and have no idea whether they are sampling enough items to actually be sure, with some desired level of confidence, that they have found no defects. This simple, inexpensive, and statistically rigorous technique will allow auditors who actually want to do a good job to quantify the precision of their statements in a very common application.

This paper combines several disparate threads from the statistical literature on audit sampling in a way that auditors (who are usually not statisticians) can apply them for auditing the quality of a lender's portfolio – microfinance or otherwise – which is a very common need.

The background and operation of ‘UPDATE’, a program to control the loan of about 3000 items per year from the library of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, Foulness are described. New loans, extensions, and deletions are entered on‐line at a teletype operating in conversational mode and records are stored in Aldermaston Multi‐Access Configuration (AMAC) files on the IBM 370/165 at Aldermaston. Recall notices for overdue items are printed on the teletype on demand, as well as ‘telephone action’ lists of very overdue material. Waiting lists of borrowers can be maintained. An archival ‘catalogue’ file is used to record deleted loans so as to reduce key boarding. Borrowers' reactions to the system and the number of operator man‐hours required are analysed. One of the main advantages is the increased effectiveness of recall procedures.

An objective method of pricing, where the cost of each component of a product is determined separately, is relevant to the pricing of loans in banking. Relevant factors in this case are a “real rate” of interest, an inflation premium, administrative expenses, a maturity factor and an allowance for credit risk. All these can be accounted for in the pricing of retail loans. This systematic approach enhances the loan pricing procedure and offers an objective way for an institution to establish and monitor the risk level of its portfolio of earning assets. From data it is clear that banking has priced its retail loans well and this brings the evolution of new pricing techniques into question.

The Loan Guarantee Scheme (LGS) was set up in 1981 to fill a perceived gap in the financing of smaller firms. It was designed specifically for firms who were constrained in their ability to borrow from banks by a lack of collateral. In 1996, loans issued under the scheme were at their highest level ever and rising at an increased rate. This paper uses previously unavailable data to give a broad feel for how borrowing patterns have changed over the period 1987–1995, the type and nature of borrowers using the scheme and the type of loans which they take out. The results give a number of important insights which merit further attention from academics and policy‐makers. Unfortunately, there is no information on the attitudes of banks towards the scheme, although anecdotal evidence suggests that they have adopted a more favourable, proactive stance towards the scheme in the last three years.