Brand promise is typically easy to articulate but hard to implement. In today’s large banking organizations, the task of aligning brand promise with the customer experience as it’s perceived on the front lines typically falls to the organization’s top marketing executives. In the following interview, Paul Kadin, Citibank’s head of Marketing Operations and Strategy for North America, Read More
Customer segmentation is a key element of bank marketing these days as companies search for growth in a slow-growth economy. New York City-based Citigroup, for example, has long been focused on women as a segment, maintaining a Website for female customers since 2000. Earlier this year, Citi revamped and expanded that Website, titled Women & Co., to all Read More
Retail banking today is more complex than ever for many reasons, including changing consumer preferences, regulatory uncertainty and the challenge of maintaining an array of delivery channels that are now available to and expected by customers. Each channel features different but robust functionalities and most customers use multiple channels to accommodate their banking needs. Additionally, with a Read More
What to do with the branch in an era of declining revenues is one of the top strategic problems facing retail bankers as they look to 2012 and beyond. With fee income expected to be down 30% or more next year due to recent regulatory restrictions, banks are under pressure to make their branch networks more productive. Read More
A bank is a digital business and, as a digital business, can be broken down into pure bits and bytes. More than that, a bank can be seen as three digital businesses in one: a manufacturer of products; a processor of transactions; and a retailer of services. In this context, the digitization of banking becomes more interesting Read More
When bankers sit down to design new products in this new regulatory era, they should bring their compliance experts in at the start of the conversation rather than at the end. That’s the advice from David Silberman, assistant director, deposit and payment markets, at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). “Compliance is not something that happens at Read More
Making life easier for customers – that’s the key principle underlining the innovative products and services that emerged as winners in the 2011 BAI-Finacle Global Banking Innovation Awards. Spain-based “la Caixa,” Australia’s UBank, New Zealand-based ASB Bank and Citibank U.S. all introduced innovations that improved convenience and ease-of-use for customers. “la Caixa” won the Most Innovative Bank Read More
It wasn’t too many years ago that banking could be considered a local industry, particularly in the U.S. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the advent of interstate banking created first regional and then national financial institutions. Today, banking is clearly a global industry – as the current financial crisis constantly reminds us – with major institutions Read More
Bankers in any one country may be excused for thinking the challenges they face are unique but the fact is that retail financial institutions across the globe are struggling with common problems in the wake of the recent financial crisis – such as restoring the trust of customers. Innovation in developing products and services better targeted to Read More
Channel management is arguably one of the most important functions in today’s banking industry as institutions are caught between the eroding viability of traditional branches and the need to accommodate emerging channels such as mobile. How do banks plan for future changes in customer channel preference while still meeting the needs of today’s customers? We posed that Read More
In 2008, Jon Levey and Steve Sherman, both former LaSalle Bank lenders, and Steve’s father Harold Sherman, a long-time Chicago-area community banker, began pursuing a dream to develop a community bank that would re-shape how banking is done, with an emphasis on environmental sustainability. Despite a tumultuous time in the lending industry, GreenChoice Bank, calling itself the Read More
While employment, manufacturing and retail indicators appear to point to an economic recovery, there remains a disturbing trend amongst America’s small business owners. As the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) recently stated in a report: “Even as demand for credit begins to rise and as companies again start to expand ... the environment for small business Read More
