| Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 國際企業學研究所 === 93 === The agenda of financial holding companies (FHCs) or universal banking has been discussed for nearly a hundred years. The discussions were mainly based on public interests. Discussions on the behalf of managers of the FHCs were few. How an FHC build competitive advantages was seldom studied.
In this research, an FHC was conceptualized as a multibusiness firm formed to fully exploit some resources for synergies and economies of scope. Customer relationships/ knowledge is one of the core resources of an FHC and is referred to as “external social capital” in the research. This resource is inimitable for competitors and thus important to the competitive advantages of an FHC. For the synergies to be created, the coordination capability is needed to coordinate the exchange and sharing of resources among subsidiaries. The “internal social capital” facilitates an FHC to overcome barriers to exchange and share resources among subsidiaries. Thus, internal social capital is an essential capability for competitive advantages of an FHC.
In order to test the hypotheses of social capital in building competitive advantages for FHCs, we use data from the relationships between FHCs and their customers with large samples, finding that both external social capital and internal social capital have significant effects on competitive advantages of FHCs. Specifically, trust, status, and cross-selling included in external (Burt’s type) social capital significantly affect the competitive advantages of an FHC. The number of prior direct ties between FHC subsidiaries and their customers has strong positive effects on the competitive advantages of the subsidiaries, but the relationships are not monotonic. For cross-selling to be realized, the following conditions must be satisfied simultaneously: (1) the two subsidiaries must have the same target markets; (2) the FHC must have strong social capital with the customer to be transferred. Namely, only customers of commercial banking subsidiaries could be transferred to underwriting ones. Customers of underwriting subsidiaries could not be transferred to commercial banking ones. Customers could neither be transferred between assets management subsidiaries and commercial banking ones nor between assets management subsidiaries and underwriting ones. The internal (Coleman’s type) social capital has significant effects on the competitive advantages of an FHC, too. The tie, status, trust, and obligation and expectation among subsidiaries affect the competitive advantages of subsidiaries significantly. The integration of information system within an FHC also has positive effects.
This research contributes both to theories of the social capital, resource and capability-based view and to managers of the FHCs.
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