Modelling of Domestic and Foreign Visitors’ Behaviour at Commercial Bank Website during the Recent Financial Crisis

DRLÍK MARTIN, PILKOVÁ ANNA, MUNK MICHAL, ŠVEC PETER: Modelling of domestic and foreign visitors’ behaviour at commercial bank website during the recent fi nancial crisis. Acta Universitatis Agriculturae et Silviculturae Mendelianae Brunensis, 2013, LXI, No. 7, pp. 2065–2070 The paper focuses on modelling of commercial bank website visitors’ behaviour. The authors analyse domestic and foreign market participants’ interests in mandatory fi nancial information disclosure of a commercial bank during the recent fi nancial crisis and try to answer the question whether the purposes of Basel 2 regulations under the Pillar 3 – Market discipline, publishing fi nancial information, have been fulfi lled. The authors analyse bank website logs fi les using web log mining methods to better understand the rate of using of web pages, where mandatory fi nancial information about Basel 2 is published. A er data pre-processing the authors use association rule analysis to identify the association among content categories of the website. The results show that there is small interest in mandatory fi nancial information disclosure by the commercial bank in general. The foreign website visitors take more concern in mandatory fi nancial information disclosure, and they take less interest in general information about bank than domestic ones. Basel 2 Pillar 3, information disclosure, user behaviour modelling, web log mining, website analytics Market discipline (MD) in banking represents the mechanism via which market participants monitor and discipline excessive risk-taking behaviour by banks (Stephanou, 2010). The importance of MD has been formally stressed through the latest architecture of the banking regulatory frameworks Basel II and Basel III (BCBS, 2006; BCBS, 2011). Within these frameworks market discipline is one of the three pillars, it constitutes the Pillar 3. The European institutions only require Pillar 3 information to be disclosed publicly. In general, the disclosures are to be made to the market for the benefi t of the market. The banks publish the Pillar 3 information on their website, which is currently the best way how to make information easily accessible to market participants. We try to answer the question if this information disclosure according to Basel II, Pillar 3 is interesting for diff erent kinds of stakeholders. We model the behaviour of users browsing bank website where information is publicly available. We analyse the market participants’ interest in mandatory disclosure of fi nancial information by means of methods of web log mining. Such study has been no carried out yet. The structure of the paper is as follows. We summarize the current status of the research in the second chapter. We introduce used methods and data resources in the third chapter. The fourth chapter describes the experimental results in detail. Finally, we discuss the obtained results in the last chapter.