An integrated performance evaluation of financial holding companies in Taiwan

There has been a worldwide trend for financial institutions to become larger in scale and more diversified in scope, with Taiwan being no exception. Fourteen financial holding companies (FHCs) have each begun to function as a management umbrella in Taiwan by investing in different types of financial services such as banking, insurance, and securities. This paper focuses on this local financing issue from an integrated methodological perspective by model innovations proposed in several earlier studies. For example, the efficiency of profitability and marketability are combined to evaluate the FHCs’ performance. To conduct a valid and reliable evaluation process while applying the FHC’s case in Taiwan, we integrate the slacks-based measure (SBM) and slacks-based measure of super efficiency (super-SBM) models in order to directly handle the slacks and identify the best performers. A new scheme that deals with the negative output data in the SBM/super-SBM is also introduced. Inter-temporal efficiency change, which is decomposed into ‘catch-up’ and ‘frontier-shift’ effects, is analyzed by means of the SBM-based Malmquist index. A decision-making matrix is also presented to help the FHCs’ managerial authorities position themselves in the industry. The above techniques show with a high degree of consistency that large-sized FHCs perform better than small-sized ones.