July 2018

What Does That One Perfect Experience Look Like in Banking?

Improving Bank Customer Experience

If you want to build a service culture that is truly unique, you have to create a banking experience that gets customers to rave about you to their family, friends and business associates. A “good” experience will earn you a four-star rating, but it won’t create a fan. A “Wow” experience, on the other hand, has to be good enough to fuel emotion and passion to the point where you just have to tell someone else about it. In this article, we look at how banks can create that experience.

 

2Q M&A Recap, Bank Earnings and Why Your Bank Has Increased In Value

Bank Valuations

This is indeed the Golden Age of Banking as our industry doesn’t get much better than this. Lending growth is strong, deposit costs are relatively low, credit quality is at or near record levels, and efficiency is likely to prove to be a record as well.  It is hard not to look like a genius banker in this market. Tax reform alone is the single biggest reason why we may see record earnings from community banks and that is on top of everything else that is going right. In this article, we do a quick recap of the latest earning trends and show why bank value is up.

Two Debit Cards From Non-Banks That Will Give Us Competition

Product Design and Banking Competition

Two non-banks released offerings last week that bankers should know about as both are poised to take market share from community banks. Venmo and Acorn both released debit cards with cutting-edge features that will now have banks scrambling to keep up. Both of these Fintech firms have partnered with community banks and applied both creative marketing and product creation to allow digital customers nationwide to leap from the digital world to physical stores. In this article, we explore the ins and outs of the products in hopes of helping banks better compete.

10 Commercial Sales Tips From Community Bankers

We just concluded our annual Bank Management Conference at the Ritz-Carlton at Amelia Island.  In our breakout sessions and conversations with attending bankers, one of the hot topics was how community banks can become better sales organizations. We shared our journey and collected some great feedback on ideas and tactics that have worked for other banks. In this article, we share the top 10 ideas that bankers expressed at our conference related to how community banks can become better at building relationships and driving sales.  

Why Your Bank Should Tie Checking and CDs Together

Boosting Deposit Performance

As deposits become more valuable, banks are getting more aggressive about raising funds. While we are not big fans of increasing liabilities through certificates of deposits (CDs), banks that do may want to consider requiring a checking account in order to increase performance. In this article, we look at some banks that do just that and how it helps them mitigate the performance degradation that normally occurs when offering higher-priced CDs.

 

Offering a Package of Products

 

How Crowdsourcing Bank Customer Service Can Help

Leveraging Tech For Bank Performance

If you are looking to engage your customers, increase satisfaction and reduce staffing, we might have an idea for you – create a crowdsourced layer of customer service experts that are your current customers. These “Expert Customers” can help your bank answer questions, speed adoption of your products and assist with relationship management all for a fraction of the cost of what you pay now. In this article, we explore what this looks like and how to pull it off.

 

Recruiting Customer Experts

Learning Artificial Intelligence in Banking: Part 2 – Ifs, Functions, and Loops

Banking Skills For The Next Decade

In a previous blog (HERE), we took got bankers used to basic programming as we went hands-on learning Python, one of the most popular and versatile coding languages for banking applications. By the end of the lesson, we created a tutorial on how to program your own ROI calculator. For this article, we take another step towards teaching bankers the power of machine learning as we expand on the computational power of computer programming.

Managing A Relationship-Driven Bank Sales Team

Bank Sales Management

The most common complaint we hear from commercial bank calling officers is the lack of time available to prospect for new clients. Commercial lenders, banking, and calling officers spend less than one-third of their time selling. The majority of their time is spent on administrative work, credit and internal meetings. Furthermore, commercial calling officers get a second meeting with a prospect only 20% of the time, and a third meeting less than 10% of the time.