COVID-19 has damaged the international economy and banking systems worldwide. Hence, banks’ performance and profitability were influenced significantly (Gazi et al. 2022b). The results indicated that the volatility spillover index increased during the pandemic crisis (Mohamed and Salah Eddin 2022). In other words, the banks were the main sector associated with volatility spillover (Chirilă 2022). Therefore, commercial banks were also exposed to the pandemic, which had a negative impact on their efficiency and productivity (Ünlü et al. 2022). Accordingly, it was found that insured or uninsured depositors chose different banks due to the pandemic as a result of the effect of political and financial events (Ghouse et al. 2022).

Facing the impact and challenges derived from the pandemic, some responsive measures needed to be adopted by the banking industry. Digitalization was the measure mentioned most often. Stefanovic et al. (2021) proposed that digitalization was an important factor and needed to be strengthened and included in bank strategies during the pandemic. Szili et al. (2022) argued that many factors could affect the choice made by banks because these factors might also change and speed up the digitalization of banks. Supari and Anton (2022) highlighted that it was necessary to intervene in small and medium enterprises and help them to increase their resilience by means of digitalization. Specifically, the financial digitalization technologies that were usually employed by the banking industry to respond to the pandemic included Fintech (Abdul-Rahim et al. 2022), online payment, a hybrid machine learning and swarm metaheuristic approach (Jovanovic et al. 2022), and big data from FinTech websites (Sakas et al. 2022). Similarly, Ar and Abbas (2021a) explored the application of information communication technology in the Pakistani government and also recognized the contributions to COVID-19, ICT, the e-government, and public–private collaboration.

In addition, the corporate governance mechanism was thought to be effective in improving the financial performance of banks during the pandemic (El-Chaarani et al. 2022). Therefore, corporate governance had been regarded as the moderator of knowledge management, business strategy, and innovation capabilities, which are important to improving organizational effectiveness and competitiveness (Kien and That 2022). Furthermore, Kabbani et al. (2022) suggested that banks should encourage leaders to strengthen suitable behaviors and attitudes to create an ethical culture and improve employees’ willingness to get the COVID-19 vaccination. Additionally, Soemitra et al. (2022) proposed that the Micro Waqf Bank had played a role in empowering women to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Initially, the pandemic was a health emergency and eventually caused an unpredictably negative influence on the global economy. Unfortunately, no country could be regarded as exemplary in their response to the economic crisis caused by the pandemic (Mustafa et al. 2021). Amir et al. (2021) also asserted that education, communication, and information were the primary methods in the early phase of the pandemic before the vaccines. Akram et al. (2018) argued that the banking industry had to continue to review its explicit and implicit management strategies to meet changing consumer needs and its sustainable development to improve organizational performance because the impact on the banking industry, especially consumer finance, was immediately apparent. Mila et al. (2021) stressed that knowledge management played a vital role during the COVID-19 outbreak, although knowledge management strategies were different in domestic and foreign enterprises and had different impacts on the varying levels of organizations. Therefore, supported by successful sustainability performance and a competitive advantage, accurate knowledge management could help organizations to survive future pandemics. 

In terms of headquarters, Laidroo and Ööbik (2013) investigated the disclosed quantity of corporate social responsibility and the transparency of banks’ headquarters and argued that the patterns of disclosed quantities were different unit by unit. Furthermore, Barnes and Newton (2019) directly focused on the headquarters of the National Provincial Bank of England and demonstrated that its national identity was impressive as it differed from its rivals. Specifically, the banking industry could benefit from knowledge management and use their resources sufficiently (Cebi et al. 2010). In other words, the headquarters system recognized the inherent nature of organizations, which could facilitate their successful transformation during the pandemic. Therefore, the headquarters had to play an important role in various kinds of incentives, including hiring, promoting, and punishing, as well as enforcing rules, discouraging dissonant views and manipulating data (Broad 2007).

Due to the importance of the knowledge economy, human resources have been agreed upon as the most important resource for enterprises. In particular, corporate performance could be increased by improving human resources (Wu et al. 2022). Furthermore, the role of the human factor was essential in the implementation and application of the own normative system, which not only had the role of risk reduction, but also, in particular, the realization of the bank’s strategies and policies. It was seen that human resource management was already a priority element of the evolutionary strategies of a modern bank (Tomescu-Dumitrescu 2020). Similarly, D’Angelo et al. (2022) also argued that human resources had to play a leading role in developing human capital management on the basis of caring, evaluating, developing, and training. Additionally, the government was required to devote time to human resource management and reach the strategic goals of the banking industry (Van Hoa et al. 2022). Human resource management was even considered to be able to mitigate barriers and ensure effective and sufficient manpower in the Banking 4.0 era (Kuchciak and Warwas 2021). Additionally, human resource managers could apply human resource information systems to make strategic decisions with the help of timely and effective information (Mohamed et al. 2022). It is no wonder that Islamic financial principles needed to be supplemented with managerial skills. This was because human resources in Islamic finance had not their reached optimal level, especially in the banking industry (Firdiansyah 2021).

Nedelchev (2003) stated that corporate image could be translated into identifying the corporation and communicating with its stakeholders. Osman et al. (2015) argued that even Islamic banks needed to incorporate a corporate performance image. It could be seen that corporate image was highly important, as expected. Furthermore, it was recognized that the positive corporate image (CI) served as a major factor for the stability of the banking system (Nedelchev 2002) and that corporate image had a positive effect on financial services provided by banks (Awan et al. 2018). Ologbenla (2021) even proposed that corporate governance could be substituted by corporate image, which had a significant influence on banks’ customer loyalty. In other words, banks needed corporate image to improve their competitiveness because corporate image was evaluated as more important than reputation by customers (Szwajca 2018). Furthermore, Ar and Abbas (2021b) argued that enterprises could boost their image through supporting the government and society, which could help them overcome the damaged caused by sickness and disease.

Banks had to consider various problems when attempting to find a suitable location for their branches. For example, the distance from customers to the branches should be minimized. This factor determined the customers’ attraction to the banks (Talatahari et al. 2022). Heard et al. (2017) also proposed that location decisions were important for local banks, and suggested that past visits were more suitable for explaining recent visits. Taking foreign banks in Spain as an example, the location of offices might be positive or negative, depending on various types of variables (Corra-Arias 2020). Similarly, foreign banks in China did not receive the same benefits as domestic banks. Therefore, they could not perform as well as domestic banks even if they were in the same location. As a result, the cost of the disadvantages of being a foreign bank exceeded the cost of location disadvantages (Liu et al. 2021).

Innovation was important for banks to respond to COVID-19, which combined both knowledge management and business strategy and affected innovation capabilities (Kien and That 2022). Similarly, Edeh et al. (2022) proposed that knowledge management had an important impact on innovation in the banking industry. Therefore, knowledge management implemented by managers was proven to increase innovation capabilities, including marketing, producing, and processing. Furthermore, the innovation performance of the accounting system had a positive effect on the business performance when managers required performance evaluations (Gazi et al. 2022a). On the other hand, the implementation of financial innovation from nonfinancial firms also had to be supported to reduce various challenges and barriers (Błach 2020). It could be seen that innovation was an important factor to determine sustainable development and played a leading role from a financial perspective (Kuś and Grego-Planer 2021).

Interactive marketing and database marketing were the dominant roles played by banks (Choudhury et al. 2022). Ndegwa (2022) proposed that banks should employ electronic marketing strategies to increase their competitiveness in the local or international market. Özkaynar (2022) argued that banks’ marketing strategies had to incorporate new technologies such as the Metaverse, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency. Islam et al. (2022) indicated that banks could gain more from event marketing than traditional advertising because the former could generate more attention than the latter. Simultaneously, Uksumenko et al. (2017) asserted that banks needed to adapt themselves to the fast changes and made use of digital marketing services such as Internet banking, mobile banking, and ATM, to connect their customers, which could help banks promote their products effectively and reach their marketing goals (Nguru et al. 2017).

Banks were asked to contribute to the stability of the market and society during the pandemic crisis. Making access to credit easier or keeping rates low were among the options (Ordonez-Ponce et al. 2022). To adapt crisis management strategies to financial crises, banks had to pay more attention to crisis management, and anti-crisis tools were consequently developed to improve management performance (Sinyagovsky 2021). Additionally, with the deterioration of the financial conditions derived from COVID-19 and military aggression in Eastern Ukraine, the anti-crisis management of banks was employed more broadly to maintain the stability of the financial market (Drahan et al. 2021). In other words, it was believed that anti-crisis management was a dominant factor to overcome these challenges and ensure stability and sustainability in the development of banks (Rushchyshyn et al. 2022). Therefore, it could be recognized that anti-crisis management required a conceptual basis, which determined how they prioritized their functions to reduce and neutralize a crisis (Kopylyuk et al. 2019). Finally, central banks had to play a significant role in implementing crisis management and processing crisis resolution, though the crises were caused by imperfect market functioning (Singh 2018).

According to the objective, method, and findings, the seven criteria are summarized in Table 1.