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The profitability of financial institutions is derived from the distribution of risk. Therefore, the setup of a brokerage’s branch office should not be guided solely by business and revenue concerns but also by risk distribution and changes to management, which can affect the overall success or failure of the institution. The performance benchmark must account for risk to properly reflect performance. The calculation of RAROC (Risk-Adjusted Return on Capital) accounts for risk and can show the relationship between risk and capital return. In this paper, we use RAROC to evaluate the performance of securities brokerage’s branch offices and compare the difference between the performance valuation under RAROC and the traditional system of performance valuation. The results can be summarized as follows: 1. Traditional branch office performance valuation is focused on the attainment of business/revenue goals; its difference from RAROC-valued performance is mainly that traditional performance valuations do not effectively consider the discount rate and yield of the branch office’s fee income. 2. The four independent variables which affect branch office RAROC are as follows: 1) brokerage market share; 2) discount rate on brokerage fee income; 3) branch office yield; and 4) the weighting of margin transactions. The discount rate on brokerage fee income has significant negative correlation with the RAROC, while the other three variables have significant positive correlations with the RAROC. 3. Another performance measurement, the ratio of branch office EBT (earnings before tax) and brokerage revenue, is easy to calculate and has a high correlation with RAROC; it may be a substitute for RAROC as a branch office performance estimate.
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