Five Challenges to Your Bank of the Future and Ideas to Overcome Them

I recently spoke at a Financial Managers' Society (FMS) breakfast meeting on this subject and thought I would share my comments with you.

With all of our anguish, torment, debate, and deliberation about the future of our country, our industry, and our bank, here are some common themes that I have been seeing that can be improved should bank management commit to making them happen.

Forget the things outside of your control. These five themes are firmly within your ability to make a positive impact on your future.

1. We merge, citing economies of scale, but fail to realize them. In 2006, when the median asset size within my firm's profitability outsourcing service was $696 million, the operating cost per business checking account was $586 per year. In 2016, the median sized financial institution is $1.1 billion, and the operating cost per business checking account is $710. In other words, the financial institutions grew, and the cost per account grew. This is the theme across nearly every product category. Don't believe me, check your banks' expense ratio (operating expense/average assets) or efficiency ratio as you grew.

Idea: Create measurable incentives to support centers to provide more efficient support to profit centers and for risk mitigation. For example, deposit operations' expense as a percent of deposits should decline as the bank grows. Loan servicing expense as a percent of the loan portfolio should do the same. 

2. We over-invest in under-performing branches. I recently mentioned to a community bank management team that community financial institutions are slower to close branches because their decision making goes beyond the spreadsheet and market potential. Community bankers know the town mayor, and key business leaders. So they worry about other things that go beyond the fact that their branch in that market has little chance of being profitable. But allowing branches to operate at losses takes resources away from areas that need immediate resources, such as technology acquisition and deployment.

Idea: Develop objective analyses for entering markets. If the branch does not meet profit objectives within a reasonable period represented in the original analysis to open it, close it. Make it near-automatic.

3. Our brand awareness and customer acquisition strategy is moving at a turtle's pace, not the hare pace of the industry. In my firm's most recent podcast, we discussed the recently released FDIC Summary of Deposits data that showed, with all of the negative press surrounding large financial institutions, FDIC-insured banks with greater than $10 billion in assets moved from an 80.6% deposit market share in 2012 to an 80.7% today. This phenomenon was brought home when a banker told me that, in the Philly suburbs, Ally Bank was the most recognizable banking brand. Aren't they still owned by our government? 

Idea: Develop a clear message on what your bank represents and align your culture, and all sales and marketing channels to deliver your value proposition. 

4. We embrace complexity when we should be seeking simplicity. The decline in defined benefit pension plans combined with the increases in defined contribution (401k) plans, the abysmally low US savings rate (31% of non-retired people have no retirement savings), and the increasing complexity of running family and business finances presents an opportunity for community financial institutions to make their customers' lives simpler. We should start with ourselves. For example, when onboarding a customer, an FI can perform needs assessments, risk assessments (needed for risk management purposes), and customer capital allocation needs all at once, and add value to the customer relationship. 

Idea: At account opening, build an automated business process that includes the needed Q&A to assess customer needs that spurs post-account opening follow up, know-your-customer information, and risk assessments required to risk rate customers that assigns a rating that drives capital allocations to that customers' balances and rolls up to determine the bank's capital requirements.

5. We under-invest in the people that can build our bank. Because of over-investment in areas such as regulation and unprofitable branches, we under-invest in elevating the abilities of our employees to serve as advisers to customers, as highlighted above. Also, we tend to buy key people on the street, such as commercial lenders, rather than raising them within our bank, because of the time and resource investment needed to turn junior level people into productive commercial lenders.

Idea: Build a bankwide university that includes on-the-job training, web-based seminars, in-person training, and banking schools to create career paths for junior-level people that will reduce our need to buy senior-level people on the street, and elevate the skill sets of employees to actually advise customers, rather than only sell to them.

If I were to end this post with a theme, it would be urgency. We are past the time to lament about the interest rate and economic environment, and Dodd-Frank. They are outside of our control.

We are intuitively aware of the above challenges. The good news is we can do something about them. Address them this year, this month... no, this week! And your bank will move forward to an independent future for your employees, customers, and community. 

Did I miss any challenges within our control?

~ Jeff

Bankers: Give Your Employees a Bucket of Balls

Very few financial institutions commit to the level of employee development found in some of our largest corporations. The fear, aside from the cost of a homegrown development program, is that employees will leave. I have news for you, you should be afraid the untrained will stay.

What banks do you know that have a formal employee development program?

~ Jeff

Fiserv: Give Your Clients a Test Bank

Community banks are struggling to build a training curriculum to develop branch bankers of the future. Aside from moving from a transaction to an advice, sales, and service culture, they also struggle with operational training.

Why?

The story of declining branch traffic, and the resulting reduction of branch transactions, is reducing the repetition of common and uncommon transactions alike, and therefore the opportunity to improve operational skills of branch employees.

When I was a branch banker over 20 years ago, I went to headquarters, stood at mock-up teller lines with a dozen of my colleagues, and a trainer drilled us on running common transactions with enough repetition to imprint the "how to" in our brains. Well, at least my colleagues brains. I never claimed to be an operational wizard.

Some banks still do this. But with branch turnover down due to a weak job market, and the industry moving to universal banker, these training test beds are on the decline, in my experience. As they should be. No reason to institutionalize what is quickly becoming an outdated model... tellers standing behind the rigid teller line anxiously awaiting for the flood of customers that no longer come.

So how do banks increase proficiency with transaction processing? Most accomplish through on-the-job training (OJT), in my experience. But with common transactions being done less frequently, particularly in smaller or more rural branches, and uncommon ones perhaps happening once per month or less, how are branch bankers getting the reps needed to become proficient?

Some are being deployed to a bank's busiest branch, typically the headquarters office, for some OJT before being deployed into the branch network. This is a natural reaction to get reps, and be productive once sent to their primary branch.

But how can your core processor be helpful?

Those that have been through the painful core processor conversion experience know that the Fiserv's and Jack Henry's of the world establish a "test bank" to get your people proficient at all sorts of interactions with your soon to be deployed core.

My question: Why give this up?

I reviewed all data processing expenses for Southeast banks with assets between $800 million and $1.2 billion in total assets. Community banks. The results of my analysis are in the chart below.

In terms of the Call Report, Data Processing Expense category, these banks spent on average almost $1 million in 2015. And the trend is decidedly up. Not a small sum.

In my firm's profit improvement engagements, we see wild fluctuations in core processing expenses. Telling me: 1) banks buy different services from their core processor, and 2) there should be negotiating flexibility given the dollars involved.

What I suggest is negotiating a "test bank" that remains open for continuous training with your employees. Not just branch employees, but everyone that interacts with the core. This will improve the effectiveness of your OJT program, increase transactional proficiency, and allow your bank to dedicate more resources to higher level employee development. It will also retire "Mickey Mouse" and "Donald Duck" as customers. Bankers know what I'm talking about.

There's enough margin in that Fiserv contract to make this happen. Make it so!

~ Jeff

Breaking Branch Mediocrity

Another day, another convoluted organizational structure that includes “small business bankers” that are dispersed into the branch network to shore up branch capabilities. If not small business bankers, it’s “cash management officers”, or “business development officers”. Why add a protective wrap of additional employees around your branches?

Because branch staff are too busy with operational duties to go out into the community and pro-actively hunt for business. I’ve been to a lot of branches as I travel the land looking for opportunities for banks to improve profits. I rarely see a “busy” branch. One time I saw a line for a teller and was so amazed at the site that I snapped a photo. The bank security officer set me straight. Don’t case the joint.

If bankers were truthful to themselves, they would recognize that these branch wraps, i.e. additional employees with fancy titles, are nothing more than covering up for the perceived shortfall in branch staff skills to be the face of the bank in our communities and pro-active business developers. If you are nodding your head in agreement, read on. 

If you are irritated at the theory and are scrunching your eyebrows like you bit into a lemon, then continue to add the layers to your organizational structure and move on to an article about the “branch of the future”.

Instead of adding staff and layering the cost onto an already burdened branch network (who pays for the compliance analyst you just hired?), why don’t you get the most from the investment you already make in your branches? I have four suggestions for you to improve the abilities of these critical profit centers.

1. Hire to execute your strategy. This assumes you have a strategy that is more focused than “we’re a bank”. If your strategy is to be the number one business bank in the markets that you serve, then hire branch employees that can speak intelligently to business owners about how your bank can better serve them. If those employees are inept at balancing a teller drawer, then so be it. If your staff is highly capable at ATM replenishment but cringe at the thought of speaking to a small business owner about a sweep account, read on…

2. Develop your branch staff. In my experience, the percent of banks that have specific training curricula for branch staff that goes beyond operations and compliance is somewhere south of Pi, if Pi were a percent, and I actually knew what Pi is. But you get the picture. When I was in the military, we had a training calendar for every functional position that included on-the-job (OJT), computer based, self-taught/correspondence, and classroom training. Each sailor was responsible for matriculating through the training program when they were not forward deployed. When they completed certain stages, they received certificates and were deemed “South-East Asia qualified”, or whatever designation the training was intended to accomplish. Do we have a “Small Business Qualified” designation in your training curriculum? If you are not satisfied with branch staff abilities to execute your strategy, and have invested the time and energy into developing them without results, then perhaps you have the wrong staff.  But don’t complain about staff capabilities if you have done nothing to improve them.

3.  Provide meaningful incentives. If you have heard me speak, I bang the drum loudly about branch incentives. You want branch staff to be the tip of the spear for small business relationship acquisition but give those that succeed a 4% raise and a $500 holiday bonus while those that are not successful a 3% raise and a $400 bonus? Why are we surprised that we have to build a “wrap” of different employees around branch staff? Instead of providing incentives based on deposit balances, how about branch profitability? Imagine the behavior differences if branch managers were charged with improving their deposit spreads, fee income generation, and managing their expenses? Would you get the desperate phone call for a rate exception for a $200,000 CD for a single-service customer to “keep the money at the bank”? Doubt it, because that $200,000 would be generating far less spread than the $40,000 operating account from Joe’s Tire and Battery. Even though Joe leaves grease at your teller counter every time he comes in. Why not pay branch managers for the important position that they hold in executing your strategy? Would it be beneficial to make variable compensation a greater and more meaningful component to the overall compensation package?

4. Communicate your strategy. That is, communicate it if you actually have a strategy. Being everything banking to everyone in the markets where you have branches is not a strategy, dear reader. If your strategy is the beef stew of all strategies (i.e. throw everything into the pot), then expect to be average. Wouldn’t that make a great epithet? Here lies Jeff, he was average. But assuming you have a strategy that clearly identifies the bank you strive to become, then communicate it to your employees! Who else do you expect to execute on the strategy day to day? If your strategy is to be the number one business bank, as ranked by the regional business journal, then identify objectives to achieve it and have your employees march a straight line to get there. Maybe then your branch manager will know that you want more customers like Joe’s Tire and Battery, regardless of having to use Mr. Clean on your teller counter after he leaves.

There you have it! Four concrete steps you can take to make branches more effective at achieving your strategic objectives. Did I miss anything?

~ Jeff

Note: This post first appeared as a guest post on Deluxe Corp's Forward Banker Blog in July 2014.

The Three Levels of Business Bankers

Community bankers hunt aggressively for experienced lenders to grow their loan portfolios. I outlined a Business Banker job description in a prior post based on what I hear from bankers about what they expect from that position. 

You can't teach an old dog new tricks. If that job description represents our ideal, then we have a long way to go to develop the type of business bankers that will drive our bank forward. Instead of striving for our ideal, we continue to pluck old-school lenders from competitors because we need our pipelines filled now, not two years from now. So I opined to a community bank client what I thought was a healthy composition of business bankers.

Note I mention banker composition, not loan composition. For risk management purposes, we are accustomed to managing the mix of loans on our books. We may not be as accustomed to managing the mix of employees responsible for generating those loans. I put Business Banker composition in three categories.

1.  The Fat Cat

Don't contact my HR department. This is not commentary on his or her body composition. It's more a testimony as to the size of the Fat Cat's portfolio. It's usually large (typically > $50 million). And size does matter. Because of the large portfolio, this lender comes with a high number of relationships, and little time for meaningless meetings and all of your chatter about "total relationships" and "core deposits". Their portfolio is large and profitable, and they know it. Their salary is high and the bonus pool is flush. They are not as concerned about growing their portfolio as they are about maintaining it. They might be open to sharing smaller relationships with more junior business bankers, but not because they are the best team players. They simply don't have time to deal with lower balance customers, and they know that balances drive their bonus pool. They are also hesitant to bring other bankers into their relationships, for fear they may screw them up.

2.  The Builder

This person has a mid-range portfolio, somewhere in the $25-$50 million range. They take their growth goals seriously. Because they see the Fat Cats reaching critical mass and milking those portfolios into retirement. They want that too! So they leverage their relationships into more relationships such as calling on COI's they met at the latest Chamber mixer. This group may also be willing to take the junior business banker under their wing. They are not so far removed from the "junior" status that they lack empathy for the Up and Comers. Unlike the Fat Cats, this group tend to be better team players, because they may have greater organizational ambitions other than to be a Fat Cat.

3.  The Up and Comer

This person came from the branch manager, credit analyst, or portfolio manager ranks. They received a taste of the life of a business banker in their former position and they liked it. They have small portfolios, typically well under $25 million. Community banks frequently have inadequate support structures to nurture the Up and Comer. They have no mentoring programs, little in terms of formal training, and even less in terms of patience and the ability to carry "non-producing" producers for any significant period. But the Up and Comer can be the Builder and Fat Cats of the future, if the community bank thought farther than the current budget into the future. Another benefit of populating your Business Banker ranks equally with Up and Comers is instead of taking more experienced ones from competitors and inheriting their way of doing things, this group grew up in your way of doing things. 

If your Business Banker ranks were built by you, first as Up and Comers, steeped in your bank's way, that grew into Builders and Fat Cats, would you be better capable of moving your bank forward?

~ Jeff

Job Description: EVP of Distribution and Service Excellence

Figures don't lie. Financial Institution (FI) customers interface with us online far more frequently than in person. Has our organizational structure evolved to meet this challenge? I think not.

This post is geared toward drafting a job description of an FI EVP of Distribution and Service Excellence. Flowery name, I know. I also look at names such as Chief Experience Officer with extreme skepticism. But this position is different. And it's not my idea. I first wrote of such a position based on an idea posed by a student in my class at the North Carolina School of Banking.  I envision the person occupying this role to be a savvy marketer with strong IT skills, as well as senior leadership abilities. Here is my job description for such a position. 

EVP of Distribution and Service Excellence

Summary of Responsibilities: Member of Senior Management... As a member of senior management, this person participates in setting and executing the FIs strategy. Ensure compliance with all industry laws and regulations. Assist the Board in setting organizational policy and develop procedures to follow policy. Run the FI in a safe and sound manner. Participate in community events and represent the FI within the community. Join one community organization consistent with FI strategy and employee interests/values and be active in the organization's leadership. Participate in trade association(s) and assume a leadership position in at least one industry trade association.

Marketing and Product Development... Direct supervision of the Marketing and Product Development department. The department's responsibilities are to collaborate with business line leadership in developing tactics to deepen existing relationships and win new relationships with customers consistent with strategy. Develop and support a brand that is consistent with strategy, including traditional and non-traditional advertising, social media, and service excellence criteria. Develop products and product packages consistent with customer wants and needs and FI strategy.

Information Technology (IT)... Direct supervision of the IT department. The department's responsibilities are to implement and manage a stable core processing system and ancillary systems. Maintain system security. Evaluate existing and prospective systems that are consistent with strategy and safe and sound operations. Implement selected systems. Manage technology driven distribution such as online banking, mobile banking, automated teller machines (ATMs), automated teller stations, ACH, or other distribution systems that evolve. Manage relationships with technology vendors. Collaborate with other departments to ensure competitive technology driven distribution channels.

Human Resources (HR)... Direct supervision of the Human Resources department. Develop compensation, incentive, and benefits programs to attract and retain high quality employees with the greatest potential to successfully execute the FIs strategy. Ensure compliance with all HR related laws and regulations. Establish employee review program that encourages positive performance, professional growth and expertise, and remediation for low performing employees. Assist supervisors to positively influence employees, recognize superior performance, remediate poor performance, and remove employees with little chance to add to organizational growth. 

Training... Direct supervision of the Training department. Collaborate with department supervisors to develop development plans by position that focuses on skills consistent with the FIs strategy, technical, and compliance training. Develop leadership and supervision training so supervisors have the skills to motivate employees, identify high performing employees, coaching, and improve overall team performance. Manage the training aspect of FIs Succession and Executive Development plan. Be the champion to expose high performing employees to different disciplines within the FI. Ensure compliance training is consistent with industry standards.

Other duties as assigned.

Is it time to elevate technology from the current bits and bytes mentality, which in my opinion is why IT ends up reporting to an operations officer?

~ Jeff

Banking School: The ivory tower could be yours.

I am sitting at Gate 124 in Orlando waiting for my ride home from a long journey. Prior to Orlando, it was Dallas. In Dallas, I taught bank profitability and strategic planning at the ABA School of Bank Marketing Management. The school is a two year program designed to transform up-and-coming marketing professionals into well rounded bank leaders.

I have written a post on these pages regarding training programs (see Are your employees ESWS qualified?). My firm asked Are you training for the gold? in one of our quarterly newsletters. Clearly this topic remains on my mind.

Much like the Kansas City Athletics was the training ground for the New York Yankees, large banks served as the training ground for community bankers. Those big bank training programs are long gone. In strategy sessions today, senior leaders are wondering how to replace aging bankers that benefitted from those programs.

I have a few suggestions.

1.  Get your own training program. Lack of resources is the most often cited reason for community FIs not training their own. Their are several resources outside of your FI with outstanding and targeted curriculum taught by qualified instructors. National trade associations are a great resource for training your employees to be the leaders of your FI. See the ABA, ICBA, CUNA, and other trade associations to review what they offer and the relevance to your institution.

2.  Develop a curriculum by functional position. In my experience, many if not most FIs develop ad hoc training programs that reward high performing employees for a job well done by sending them to a school or conference in a nice location. But if execution of your strategy is largely in the hands of your employees, perhaps you should be serious about giving them the tools to execute that strategy. What skills do they need? How much can be accomplished in-house or via on-the-job training (OJT)? Are we teaching them to supervise, coach, communicate, and/or build a book of business. I perceive a training curriculum to be a focused mix of OJT, in-house classroom, coaching, and outside training (either industry training or academic training).

3.  Recognize high potential employees. One way to do this is to send them to a conference or school in a nice location. But another clear recognition is to prepare them to be leaders at your FI. Train them for the next level, or for another functional area. One risk we have in banking is keeping high potential employees in one functional area, developing a myopic view of your institution and our industry. Perhaps a controller or CFO should go to marketing school because they speak such a different language. In fact, there was a CFO at the ABA marketing school. Imagine that!

4. Recognize that training goes beyond the curriculum. Bankers that don't directly compete with one another openly share best practices with their colleagues. I saw it in action at the marketing school. Another benefit is developing lifelong industry contacts that you can call on for different perspectives. See the photo for a visual of the camaraderie that goes on at these schools. This not only builds morale, it can help your FI by expanding the knowledge base outside of your walls.

This may be the fourth or fifth time I have written or spoken about industry training. I intend to keep working the subject because there is not any other initiative you can undertake, in my opinion, to build a competitive advantage and to sustain your institution for future generations.

~ Jeff