ABSTRACT
Internationalisation is a broad term. It extends beyond basic notions of trade and exporting to encompass all aspects business activity that take place across national borders. Exporting is often thought of as simply the fi rst stage in a process which may extend to the establishment of a fully fl edged business presence in an overseas market. Most discussions of service marketing, including those relating to fi nancial services, tend to focus heavily on marketing in a domestic context. Equally, many textbooks on international strategy and marketing tend to focus predominantly on the activities and issues associated with companies providing physical goods. And yet services account for an increasingly large share of world trade and there is a long tradition of international activity within the fi nancial services sector. WTO fi gures suggest that in 2010, services accounted for around 25 per cent of world trade by value (World Trade Organization, 2011). Financial and insurance services accounted for about 10 per cent of all trade in services which has historically been dominated by transportation and travel. Global trade in fi nancial services had been growing by an average of 8 per cent per year between 2005 and 2010, but these averages hide a period of strong growth prior to the fi nancial crisis followed by a sharp fall – of around 16 per cent between 2008 and 2009 – following the crisis. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the falls in fi nancial services trade were larger in the EU and the US than they were in Asia and were slower to recover. Patterns of trade in insurance services (which are measured separately) are very similar, although the extent to which activity has recovered following the crisis is more limited.
