The Impact of Income Sources Diversification on Bank Performance (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Banking, Stock Exchanges, Insurance, Accounting, grade: 3.5, , language: English, abstract: The general objective of this study is to investigate the impact of income source diversification on financial performance of commercial banks in Ethiopia. Commercial banks in Ethiopia are currently facing competition from non-bank institutions entry into the activities which was in the past only role of banks. Therefore, banks started searching new income sources rather than focusing only traditional inter-mediation income generating activities. Thus, this study was to examine the impact of income sources diversification on bank performance in case of some selected commercial banks in Ethiopia by using panel data over the period 2010-2015. The study used secondary data collected mainly from each sampled banks annual report financial statements. Since the data is secondary in nature, quantitative approach was adopted. This data was analyzed by using STATA version 12 and Microsoft Excel. Fixed effect model was used, since this model is preferred than the random effect model based on the hausman specification test. Return on asset (ROA) was used as dependent variable while income diversification (Div) as independent variable with control variables such as bank size (BS) in terms of total assets, equity/ assets ratio (EAR), loan/asset ratio (LAR) and expense/income ratio (Exp). The findings of the study show that the level of diversification has a positive impact on financial performance of Ethiopian commercial banks. In addition, the study also revealed that EAR, LAR and BS had positive impact on financial performance while Exp had negative impact. The results of the study are important for bankers to understand how income diversification affects the performance of banks. Therefore, the study recommended that banks should diversify their sources of income into interest and non-interest as well as reduce operating expense in effective way, so as to enhance their performance (ROA).