Beautifying branches 

Instead of axing their branches, banks are inventing new ways to make money out of them

BANK branches in most parts of the world are home to ugly carpets, grumpy cashiers behind glass barriers, long queues of customers and racks of dull leaflets. Most people visit such purgatories only when they have to; the notion of impulse buying there is a cause for mirth. According to Abbey National, a British bank which filmed passers-by, window-shoppers actually speed up in order to avoid bank branches. 

For banks, this is a sorry state, since branches are horribly expensive to keep open. On average, branches and their staff account for about half of the costs of a typical retail bank. Bankers at one stage hoped that they might be able to persuade their customers to do business through the Internet, allowing branches to be shut down. But customers have since made it clear that while they want the convenience of Internet banking, they also insist on branches. A public-relations disaster at Barclays Bank, which closed 171 British branches on a single day last year, has made others very wary of trying something similar.

When slashing costly branch networks is out of the question, banks are trying to find ways to generate more money from their branches. One strategy is to transform them into enticing, shop-like places where people want to spend time and, with luck, more money on financial products. After Portugal’s biggest bank, Banco Comercial Portugues, bought Banco Portugues do Atlantico, it hired a consultancy, John Ryan, to help revamp its outlets. ”Atlantico used to be one of the drabbest banks, with bad lighting and laminated 1950s furniture,” says Linda Lockhart at John Ryan, whose retail training was as a lingerie buyer for Bloomingdale’s. 

After the makeover, Atlantico’s branches emerged with honey-coloured wood panelling, awnings and financial ”theatres” where customers are educated about how to control their finances. The staff are now known as ”retailers”. Rather than sit passively behind desks, they stroll around and talk to people.

Other financial institutions use more radical tactics. Abbey National in Britain, for instance, is trying a system in which 64 of its branches are treated as quasi-franchises. Instead of a fixed salary, the eight managers of these branches are paid, amongst a number of parameters, according to the volume of products they sell. The idea is not just that branch managers will be keener to attract new customers; they are also likely to know better than head office what people want. If the branches succeed in boosting revenue, and if Britain’s Financial Services Authority gives the nod, Abbey National intends to turn these branches into independent companies. So far, so good: the five geographical areas that Abbey National chose for franchising have increased their sales by 20% more than its fully-controlled branches since August last year. 

Fortis, a Dutch-Belgian provider of financial services, also uses a form of franchising: the head of each of its 400 smaller branches is viewed as self-employed and paid about a quarter of the branch’s revenues. Fortis says that the ratio of costs to revenues is 10% better in these franchised branches than in the ordinary ones. Citigroup, which has already experimented with franchising in Belgium, says that it is considering something similar for Germany. 

Slippery

Most banks, however, fear the loss of control that franchising can entail. The main risk is to a bank’s brand. The people who run the franchised branches might, for instance, ramp up short-term profits simply by cutting corners and reducing service. Colonial State Bank in Australia, another bank that decided to franchise its branches, found that while sales leapt, so too did complaints. Some of its 87 franchisees were removed. 

So far, Abbey National’s franchisees have made only small changes. They have got rid of the ”Customer Services” badges that the branch workers used to wear. Instead, staff wear their own names. In the centralised system, Abbey’s head office simply issued orders to branches, which meant that local knowledge went unheeded. ”The boffins in marketing would use us for experiments,” says Alf Langley, a franchise manager in north London. ”We felt like depositories for posters.” Now the branches are less deferential. Alan Thomas, a franchisee in Wales, sent back a load of posters and leaflets which advertised loans for houses valued at over £200,000 ($285,000). In Merthyr Tydfil, he pointed out, no houses cost that much. Instead, Mr Thomas created his own marketing material, in Welsh. 

If people are turned off by bank branches, another line of thinking goes, then put something else in them that they actually enjoy. In Japan, Suruga Bank has invited Starbucks coffee shops on to its premises, a trick also used by Wells Fargo in America and Abbey National (with Costa Coffee) in Britain. The Bank of Yokohama offers McDonald’s hamburgers alongside its cash machines. The banks get rent for letting out their branch space, but their fonder hope is that people who come in for an espresso will fancy something in the financial line. But it takes a leap, it scarcely needs saying, to go from ordering a coffee to buying a mortgage.

Perhaps the most radical answer to the question of what to do with branches is a plan by two British mutual building societies to share their premises for day-to-day transactions. Between them, the Yorkshire Building Society and Britannia have 322 branches in Britain. By sharing, they will both in effect double the size of their network at no extra cost. Eventually, the Yorkshire Building Society hopes, Britain’s remaining mutual societies (all 65 of them) will join the network. If that happens, the group could close overlapping branches and save money without annoying customers, because there would still be a shared branch for them to use. Conventional banks could do the same thing, of course, but they are still too suspicious that their customers might defect to the bank on the far side of the room.

The Economist March 22, 2001