Previously, small financial institutions with strong local ties excelled in loans to individual customers and other retail financial services, while large financial institutions considered such business less profitable relative to its costs.
Retail transactions, compared with corporate transactions, involve far greater numbers of customers and correspondingly large amounts of data, and require a large number of competent employees at branch offices to provide various financial products and services. The progress in IT, however, has made it much easier to process massive amounts of data efficiently.