Comparison of banks with cluster analysis before and after Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

The Covid-19 virus, which emerged in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, spread all over the world in 2020, bringing commercial, social and economic life to a standstill. Governments have applied many support practices to reduce the impact of the virus on the economy. With public banks’ social life support loans, those who lost their income due to the pandemic were supported. In 2020, when the most intense effects of the Covid-19 pandemic were experienced, public banks’ loan and deposit volumes grew significantly. Banks profit by using the deposits they hold or collect as loans. Therefore, the efficiency of fiscal and monetary policies is increased through banks. The study aims to investigate whether the Covid-19 pandemic has caused a change in the clustering of banks by using the financial and size data of the deposit banks in the BIST Liquid Bank Index. The study tried to determine which banks included in the Borsa İstanbul (BIST) Liquid Bank Index were clustered using the values published in the 2019 and 2020 year-end annual reports. Cluster analysis was applied using the SPSS program. The study’s findings determined that the pandemic process affected the clustering of banks and that public banks were in a different cluster compared to 2019.