Agile Methodology in European Banking Industry: A Framework for Driving Competitiveness

The European banking industry faces intensifying pressures from digital advancements, regulatory changes and evolving customer expectations, requiring greater innovation, flexibility and organizational resilience to maintain competitiveness. Total assets indicator serves as structural pillar for banking competitiveness, reflecting market position and scale in a highly concentrated sector dominated by institutions from a few leading countries. Scientific literature on Agile adoption in the banking sector highlights its origin in software development but also documents its subsequent diffusion across organizational domains to the point where Agile maturity models now assess adoption levels ranging from initial implementation to fully integrated enterprise-wise transformations. However, gaps persist in externally quantifiable measures of Agile maturity, as all models rely on internal assessments, limiting comparative analyses across institutions using secondary data. From a research methodology perspective, this quantitative study analyses the top 50 European banks by total assets in 2024 to test the hypothesis that higher Agile adoption positively influences total assets. It introduces the original Agile Adoption Proxy Indicator (AAPI) – a five-level metric ranging from 1 to 5, where level 1 reflects the absence of Agile practices, while level 5 represents the highest degree of implementation observed in the industry. In evaluating each of the 50 selected European banks, the assessment of an AAPI level is performed through deductive text-mining of annual reports, press releases, case studies and other public disclosures, using targeted keywords such as “agile”, “squad”, “tribe”. A linear regression analysis was conducted in Excel, using total assets as the dependent variable and AAPI as the independent variable. Results confirm a positive, statistically significant relationship linking higher AAPI scores to larger asset bases, though with expected modest explanatory power, indicating multifactor drivers of performance. The paper contributes AAPI as a novel, replicable external tool for Agile benchmarking and provides empirical evidence of agility’s asset-growth link.