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ay, 365 days a week (Clifton, 2009, p. 100). First Direct became an innovator in the UK banking market by meeting this consumer need and has continued to innovate and is now a multi-channel provider having, since its launch, added internet and mobile phone access to its initial telephone service offering (Devlin, 1995). This ongoing entrepreneurial behaviour has enabled First Direct to become the most successful direct banking operation in the UK (Garrett et al, 2007)

In the social sector, so called 'community development banks' have been established to help generate economic growth in deprived areas and to serve the banking needs of people living in such communities who are not able to access services from traditional banks operating in the commercial sector (Dees, 1998). A full two decades before the launch of First Direct, a Bangladeshi entrepreneur, Muhammad Yunus, launched a community bank in his native country. Grameen Bank was established to supply credit to those individuals and businesses who could not obtain loans from any other source. It bases its social responsibility principles on the philosophy that credit is a basic human right human right and prioritises those individuals who have nothing, which is the exact opposite to the philosophy of banks in the commercial sector. The creation of Grameen Bank came about when Muhammad Yunus experienced a life changing event, one of the key factors that can lead to the creation of a new venture, as identified by Shapero and Sokol's model of 'the entrepreneurial event' (1982). Yunus had direct experience of the disastrous famine which occurred in Bangladesh in 1974. The famine was of epic proportions and resulted in an estimated 1.5 million deaths. It was this experience that played a large part in Yunus' decision to become involved in efforts to reduce poverty in Bangladesh and ultimately led to him founding the Grameen Bank (Grameen Bank Website, 2010). Today, Grameen operates over one thousand branches serving over three million financially and socially impoverished people throughout Bangladesh mainly through providing credit to small enterprises (Seelos and Mair, 2005). However, unlike First Direct, Grameen has not had the absorptive capacity in IT to enable it to continue to innovate and exploit the potential of its customer base. Grameen has had to seek partnerships with major international IT providers, such as Hewlett-Packard, which has donated thousands of computers to Grameen, to enable it to establish online links for its network of various credit programmes. By establishing this network, Grameen has been able to identify, and integrate into its systems, any relevant social project it has funded in Bangladesh. This has enabled Grameen to replicate the successful business plans for such projects in any part of the country and indeed, beyond Bangladesh in to the wider world community (Maurice, 1998). Grameen Bank has not just been successful in terms of its social programme but has also been able to operate as a commercial enterprise. Despite the fact that it lends money to high risk individuals and enterprises it has managed to achieve full recovery on such loans in over 90% of cases, a record that many lenders in the so called 'sub-prime' lending market would envy (Khandker et al, 1995, p. vi).

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