Italian grocery retailers retailing financial services

The need for differentiation and customer loyalty, driven by necessity to cope with an increasingly competitive environment, such as the retail industry’s, is leading major Italian grocery retailers to widen their basic offer with non-core products. Among these products, financial services are acquiring increasing importance. In this framework, the paper describes the different ways in which Italian grocery retailers are currently providing financial services into their outlets. Building joint ventures or entering into business agreements with financial institutions; setting up in-store banking experiences; directly running financial subsidiaries, grocery retailers are actually entering the financial services sector. In this way, the industry’s boundaries are changing, bringing to a different positioning and role of the organisations involved. Specifically, the paper states a modification in the conventional bank-retailer relationship from a transactional to a co-operative or potentially competitive point of view. This was revealed through an empirical work on the businesses involved based on face-to-face interviews, whose results will be closely listed and examined.