The term “bankers’ hours” has a negative connotation and is an outdated insult at an industry where many institutions have 70-hour work weeks.
TD Commerce Bank, for example, has championed customer convenience, offering 78 branch hours per week—36 hours more than the national median. The Cherry Hill, NJ-based bank, acquired by Toronto-Dominion Bank in October, has doubled its total assets from $2.5 billion in 2003 to nearly $5 billion at the end of 2007, thanks to its reputation as “America’s Most Convenient Bank.” “The thing that we are most known for, and the thing that people look forward to the most, is our hours and our convenience,” says Linda Verba, evp of retail.
Commerce is onto something, according to MapInfo, a Troy, NY-based branch-performance technology and consulting firm owned by Pitney Bowes. It estimates that the average U.S. branch gains 0.3 percent in deposits annually for each “extended” hour it’s open. An “extended” hour is defined as all hours beyond eight during the weekday and every weekend hour. A branch with $10 million in deposits can gain an additional $30,000 for each added hour. Offering extended hours over the weekend yields an even bigger boost: an 11.6 percent growth in total weekend deposits, which means that mythical bank would gain $1.2 million in deposits annually if it’s open on weekends.
“For the bank thinking about going out there and extending their hours, the thing to think about is: ‘Do I have branches that intuitively would make sense for me to stay open late to potentially create sales after the traditional 4:30 or 5 o’clock closing times?” asks Steve Rymers, MapInfo’s director of client services.
The decision to keep a branch open later should not be a sweeping decision across all branches in its footprint, but rather a market-by-market decision. A bank should consider the competition’s hours, the added costs of staying open longer, whether staff can accommodate extended hours, and whether the branch’s location and size warrant extra hours.
The average branch is open eight hours a day, says MapInfo, with 34 percent offering extra weekday hours and 64 percent offering weekend hours. Verba says that a great differentiator for Commerce has been being open Sundays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., something only one percent of U.S. branches do. “We used to have [Sunday hours] just in our drive-throughs,” Verba says. “What we found, in some of our high-traffic stores, is that the wait time for the drive-throughs was longer than they would’ve anticipated from us. So we did a bit of analysis and we discovered that we were getting more traffic [in the branch] on a Sunday between 11 [a.m.] to 4 [p.m.] than we were all day Tuesday.”
While extended hours make sense for many banks, it’s not right for all, says James Allen, evp of Broadway Bancshares’s retail-banking division. The privately held $1.8 billion bank, headquartered in San Antonio, TX, purchased Balcones Bank two years ago; it was open until 7 p.m. during the week and 5 p.m. on Saturday. Broadway’s traditional hours are from 9 a.m. until 4 or 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday. Allen says extended hours were against the Broadway’s philosophy. “We knew we had to make an adjustment,” he recalls. “You don’t want to make it too soon. You don’t want to hack off and really disappoint the newfound customers that you just acquired. But you need to pull things back in to have some symmetry with what you have within your existing organization.” Attrition? Nil.
