Una clasificación de los bancos privados argentinos

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to find a classification of the argentine private banks on the basis of their productive specialization. For that purpose, statistical clustering methods of multivariate analysis are used. Ad-hoc variables are constructed so as to classify the private entities in different classes acording to the main sources of financial funds and the combination of services they offer. Two different groups of private banks are detected. These are labelled wholesale banks and retail banks. Applying this classification to the analysis of the interest rates charged by banks shows that wholesale banks charge an interest rate that is on average significantly lower than that of retail banks. This might be related both to their lower costs of funding and to a lower average risk of their portfolio.