Primjena odabranih statističkih metoda u ispitivanju karakteristika korištenja bankovnih usluga financijskog savjetovanja od strane poduzeća u Hrvatskoj

The main thing that connects commercial banks and clients are credits and the criteria (interest rates, fees…) on which they are being offered on the market. Today, even more than ever, provision, services in the area of safety vault, trading and liquidity, are of strategic significance for the bank and for the companies. Commercial banks policy, according to modern principles of banking management, is going in direction of providing and supplying more and more financial products to their clients, that is, offering and satisfying all the demands of the clients in order to keep them satisfied. In that sense, commercial banks offer consulting services to their clients and offer complete financial service – one-stop shop, full-service. The quality of the given services dictates the demand for that kind of service, so the consultants should posses qualities like: expertise or competency, quality consulting – clarity, availability in every moment, knowing the company, its business, financial needs, authorization to decide about fees, interest rates and other prices considering the client’s rating, counseling about investment and the choice of the product and service, safety and risk, and other characteristics that will correspond to the clients grown requests in the best way. The goals of the research were: (1) to determine to what extent Croatian medium sized and large companies use the bank’s services of financial consulting, and (2) find out if there is a difference between characteristics of the companies which use these services and the companies which do not use them. According to the survey conducted, it can be concluded that somewhat more than half of the companies use the services of financial consulting, and the largest number of the interviewees use the service two to three times a year. By that, the interviewees equally accept the advisory services in either company’s or bank’s premises. The most desirable characteristics of the financial consultant are: ability to react quickly, ability to find the solution and answer to whichever demand, knowledge of the company’s activities, and the possibility of contacting him even in non-working hours. The contribution of this research is in testing the hypothesis that the characteristics of companies which use the financial consulting services differ from the characteristics of the companies which do not use these kinds of services. Only the main results of the research will be shown. It was revealed that the investigated companies with higher total revenue use the bank’s financial consulting service more often. The education and the age of financial managers do not have an influence on the manager’s decision whether to use financial consulting services, but the female managers use consulting services more often. The company’s financial situation is also relevant, and the companies with better financial situation use the financial consulting service more often. There is no connection between using the service of financial consulting and the company’s export (measured by the proportion of export in total revenue), but the companies which cover larger market use financial consulting services more often. Based on this results it can be concluded that using the services of financial consulting contributes to the success of the company, measured in terms of total revenue, company’s financial situation (liquidity) and the size of the market that the company covers. Only constant informing and proactive monitoring of the news from financial market can assure survival, keeping current position, or in other words progress of the company in today’s turbulent times. In the future, the authors of the paper plan to include additional criteria in classifying the companies, in order to conduct even more detailed research regarding the characteristics and use of different instruments in order to protect Croatian companies from financial risk.