Celent recently published a report, Branch Boom Gone Bust: Predicting a Steep Decline in US Branch Density. As expected, some misunderstood the report as another piece decrying the death of the branch channel. It isn’t. Instead, the report advocates embracing a “right-sizing” of the branch channel as a means to strategically invest in retail delivery [...]

Earlier this week, RBS launched a mobile chat feature, available to its business mobile banking users.  RBS isn’t the only one jumping onto the mobile chat bandwagon – San Diego County Credit Union announced a similar offering . The concept is pretty straightforward, and is similar to the online chat tools that some banks have incorporated [...]

American Banker published an article last week describing Bank of America’s quest to bolster the ranks of its mobile banking customer base. According to the article, the bank is outfitting its teller stations with quick response (QR) codes that can be scanned by mobile devices to download the mobile app. What a great idea! For [...]

Finextra published an article yesterday that was also picked up by American Banker and others. The news was twofold: 1. Bank of America announced it enjoys 10 million mobile banking customers, up about 3 million from a year ago – about 43,000 new active mobile customers per week. 2. Concurrent with its swelling ranks of [...]

Every duck hunter knows that in order to avoid coming home empty-handed, one must aim ahead of the bird – lead the bird as it is commonly referred. The idea is that if one aims directly at the bird, every shot will be a miss no matter how precise the aim. That’s because by the [...]

Few global brands have created the equity of Kodak. For decades, Kodak was synonymous with family memories and led the world in intellectual capital related to imaging – in both chemical and digital realms. Kodak is a household name if there ever was one. For example, the colloquialism, “Kodak Moment”, refers to a rare, one [...]

In October 2010, USAA announced its partnership with The UPS Store to act as an in-person deposit gathering channel for the bank – something USAA has done without for years and still managed to enjoy a deposit growth rate of roughly three times the industry average. Last week, USAA announced its Easy Deposit service is [...]

Multichannel is more than a buzzword, it’s a way of life in retail financial services. With consumers increasingly using a growing array of self-service channels to interact with their financial institutions, many banks are struggling with creating and implementing a vision for their most expensive channel – the branch network. For the majority of FIs, [...]

BAI Banking Strategies recently published an excellent piece on multichannel management featuring an interview with Jim Di Ciaula of BMO Harris Bank. Reading the article inspired me to share two common pitfalls in multichannel management: following the customer and listening to the zealots. Both are examples of channel myopia. Following the Customer In a previous [...]

Tablet computing is on an obvious growth trajectory, but is this trend something banks should be acting upon, and if so – how? Said another way, led buy Apple’s iPad, will tablets change banking? In the words of Sarah Palin, “You betcha!”. We see tablets contributing to financial services channel delivery both inside the branch [...]