Designing Sustainable Banking Services: The Case of Mauritian Banks

Since the dawn of the 21st century, sustainable development has been one of the key growth concerns for many developing countries. Designing services have taken a new shape with the implications of sustainability being the heart of many significant developments in the financial industry in Mauritius. Considering the requirements of the regulatory framework and policy makers, banks are encouraged towards adopting a more pro-active and pragmatic approach towards designing their product services in view of better serving their customers and cater for future developments. The purpose of this paper is to probe into the basis of sustainable service design by reviewing existing literature and evaluating the initiatives undertaken by local banks. Though there have been studies on sustainable development in Mauritius; thus far, there have been no studies conducted on the sustainable service design aspect of banks in the Mauritian context despite its undisputed value for financial organisations attempting to com ply with sustainability framework and for policy makers to develop a sustainable development culture. The research design, being primarily exploratory in nature, comprises mainly extensive literature review coupled with in-depth qualitative data collection from selected industry practitioners. The literature clearly illustrates the significance, value and power of sustainable service design. Based on the outcomes of the literature review and collected data, managerial extrapolations have been drawn. To our knowledge, there has been no evident effort to investigate this research area in the Mauritian service/banking industry despite the richness and value it holds.