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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of formal ties in the marketing of financial services and thus provide evidence concerning the relationship between formal ties and the customer appeal of banks and investment banks.

The paper uses correspondence analysis to study formal ties between financial market actors and relates them to customer rankings. The formal ties are described as intra-, inter- and extra-organizational ties.

The authors find that there are several formal ties between financial market actors and provide compelling evidence illustrating how the attractions between financial service providers are related in several ways to the existence of formal ties between market actors.

The research is limited to formal, as opposed to informal, ties. The authors examine the essential implications of such ties.

In practice, banks and investment banks should consider the implications of formal ties and market connections to improve their performance.

Networking is a tool for the marketing of financial services and should be understood as such.

The originality of this study consists in showing the relevance of various attributes in studying networks in financial markets and in contributing to an understanding of social attributes and formal organization.

While there are several readiness assessments regarding digital transformation (DT) and Industry 4.0 in extant literature, this study aims to contribute to (a) a better understanding of digital readiness in supply chain (SC) aspects and (b) elaborate on differences between small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large enterprises.

The study is based on 409 companies that participated in the Digital Readiness Check (DRC) in the region of Salzburg (Austria) and Bavaria (Germany) – an online assessment for self-evaluating the digital readiness of companies.

The study's results provide insights for the categories of strategy, employees, initiation of business transactions and SC. These are further differentiated for SMEs and large enterprises.

The study is limited to two regions in Austria and Germany, based on a self-evaluation of companies in a single point of time perspective. For future research, the results of this study should be expanded for different regions. Further, the results could be validated regarding external observations and measuring results at a later point of time.

The DRC may help companies in benchmarking themselves and gaining a better understanding about categories that must be improved, especially regarding SC aspects of DT.

The DRC extends extant literature regarding the differentiation between SMEs and large enterprises as well as focussing on SC aspects of DT.