Explaining the Competitive Advantage of Alternative Banks: Towards an Alternative Banking eory? – Olivier Butzbach and

Introduction As mentioned in the Introduction to this volume, the surprising performance of alternative banks cannot be explained by a mainstream literature on banking mostly focused on for-pro t commercial banks. ere is, it is true, a sizeable body of works speci cally dedicated to not-for-pro t nancial institutions, and in particular to the theoretical understanding of the comparative performance of such organizations. e present chapter builds on these studies to theoretically explain the foundations of alternative banks’ competitive advantage, furthering the advances made by the empirical literature reviewed in Chapter 2. Some of these works were cited in the Introduction to the present volume.