Prioritizing Financial Resilience Indicators for Banking Stability in Iraqi Banks: An Integrated AHP-TOPSIS Framework

This study develops a context-sensitive framework for prioritizing the indicators of financial resilience for banking stability in Iraqi banks operating in a fragile emerging-market environment. Drawing on the financial resilience literature and the institutional, economic, and regulatory characteristics of Iraq, the study identifies the main dimensions, components, and indicators that shape banks’ capacity to absorb shocks, maintain essential functions, and sustain institutional continuity under financial and operational disruption. Data were collected in 2025 from 33 academic and professional experts in Iraq’s banking sector, including university professors, banking specialists, and senior bank executives. To operationalize the framework, the study employs an integrated multi-criteria decision-making approach, using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to determine the relative weights of the main dimensions and components and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to rank the indicators. The expert-based prioritization indicates that micro-level banking management received a higher relative weight than macro-level banking management, with weights of 0.5674 and 0.4326, respectively. Among the components, the financial component receives the highest global priority weight, followed by corporate governance, Supervision, policies and controls, and laws and regulations. At the indicator level, forward-looking supervision and forecasting, anti-money-laundering regulatory compliance, installment-loan share, prevention and control of corruption, credit risk, and liquidity management received the highest global priority weights in the expert-based framework. The study contributes to the literature by providing an integrated and context-sensitive framework for prioritizing resilience-related factors in Iraqi banks and by highlighting the relevance of internal management capacity, governance quality, regulatory discipline, and risk control for resilience assessment and improvement in fragile institutional settings. The findings also offer practical implications for bank managers, regulators, and policymakers seeking to enhance the continuity, resilience, and stability of financial institutions in emerging economies. The reported weights represent expert-informed priorities for resilience assessment and improvement; they do not constitute direct estimates of realized bank-level resilience or causal effects on banking stability.