Meredith Deen

At one end of the continuum for branch lobby services and sales are those banks whose frontline staff are well trained and equipped to combine prompt, knowledgeable and courteous service with enviable cross-sale rates.

If you have only scanned the headlines from the business world, the news about bank branches seems grim, as every week brings more branch closings by banks and credit unions.

An abandoned machine shop becomes a brew pub.

Smartphones are increasingly recognized as a natural conduit for everyday financial transactions, such as making payments and scanning checks for deposit.

The millennial generation, those people born roughly between 1982 and 2000, is by many accounts the fastest-growing generation ever.

When customer loyalty is tenuous, as it is today in banking, selling is especially challenging and requires more sophisticated approaches involving both management and sales staff.

What to do about low-volume branches, or LVBs, which weigh down the profitability of nearly every financial institution? We define these underperformers as branches that process fewer than 3,000 transactions per month.

How much should community banks and credit unions pay their employees in the current tough banking market? That’s a question that we probed in the 2014 edition of our Retail Salary and Benefits Study for Community Banks and Credit Unions.

As we head into the second half of the decade, most retail bank managers recognize that the survival of their institution is tied, at least in part, to redefining branches as sales and service hubs.

In the wake of highly publicized cyber-breaches, such as the data theft from 34 European banks in July, bank management may be more focused than ever on security threats from outside the bank.