Best Practice of Selecting Strategic International Agency Banking

International agency or correspondent banking (corbanking) is cross border bank to bank businesses that agent banks act on behalf of principals. Despite drastic changing banking environment, corbanking remains from doing business by mainly fee based, packaging reciprocal products and services, and so on. Corbanking is therefore identified as an alternative to serve clients worldwide in a strategic low cost way. Best practice to identify for entering corbanking relationships and selecting their correspondents are the themes of this paper, which are useful for financial institutions to make strategic and operational decisions for their expansion. Eighteen determinant factors to establish corbanking relationships and nineteen selection criteria of correspondents were identified through literature reviews, case studies, and exploratory surveys. Empirical surveys were conducted on 43 sample banks in Australia, which were further categorized in ten bank groups. Analytical methods included descriptive statistics and stepwise least square regression with case studies. The findings were: the most significant factor for financial institutions to enter correspondent banking systems was the bank size and a lower ranking factor was location not physically present, whereas there was different consensus for different bank groups about the selection criteria for agents overseas.