Designing Sustainability Comprehensive Framework for Banking: Using Meta Synthesis and Structural Modeling Interpretation

Today, bank Businesses are pressured by their stakeholders to address sustainability issues in their activities. Consequently, attention to sustainability and social responsibility in the banking business is increasing day by day. Accordingly, the main purpose of this study is to provide a framework for sustainability in bank Business. To this end, by using the Meta-synthesis approach, the 268 open codes related to sustainability in the banking industry were extracted from related articles and related studies and these open codes formed 59 axial codes. Then, these axial codes were categorized based on similarities in concepts to 10 themes of economic partnership, financial factors, energy use, environmental action, community participation, development of human resources, customer relationship, products and services, human rights issue , and governance. In the following, they were categorized into four including economic, social, and environmental and governance sustainability. Moreover, ISM structured the relationships between the themes while leveling them in a structural model based on the experts’ interprets. According to the results, the theme of human rights is at the lowest level and considered as the basis for bank sustainability. In addition, human rights, human resources, products and services, and customer relationship themes were placed in the independent area of the MICMAC chart that shows the key role and influence of these factors on other factors in the sustainability of bank business.