Banking sector sustainability performance evaluation: A methodological framework with DEA, BWM, WCC methods and intuitionistic fuzzy sets

Sustainability is among the topics of discussion for individuals, societies and businesses in recent years. It is important for future generations to include sustainability in all areas of life and to increase studies in this area. Concordantly, businesses that are a part of the society are also trying to contribute to this goal. In order to reveal the appropriateness and effectiveness of the sustainability activities carried out, it is necessary to report, measure, evaluate and compare the relevant activities. However, comprehensive methodological frameworks developed for banking sector sustainability performance assessment are limited. From this point of view, the aim of this dissertation is to propose a methodological framework for the sustainability performance evaluation of the banking sector, which is related to all sectors. For this purpose, a 4-stage process has been adopted. In the first stage, a detailed literature review was carried out to establish the conceptual framework of sustainability in the banking sector. In the second stage, financial and corporate social responsibility (CSR) efficiency analysis of banks were conducted with Data Envelopment Analysis (T-DEA and IF-DEA). In the third stage, the banking sector sustainability model (BSSM) was developed, and the criteria of the relevant model were weighted according to their importance levels with the interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy Best-Worst Method (IVIF-BWM) according to the aspects of the expert group of academicians and banking professionals. In the fourth stage, banks were ranked according to the weighted correlation coefficient (WCC) based on the BSSM criteria. For the robustness of the results, sensitivity analyzes were carried out with the different. The main results obtained in this study are as follows: (i) there is no comprehensive and accepted methodological framework for the evaluation of the sustainability performance of the banking sector, (ii) CSR efficiency should be taken into account as well as financial efficiency in the performance of banks, (iii) The developed BSSM provides a framework for evaluating the sustainability of the banking sector, (iv) The weighting of the model criteria both draws attention to the necessity of meeting different perspectives on a common point, and helps decision makers in the allocation of scarce resources. The findings of the study provide important implications for academicians and banking professionals.