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The future of retail banking has rarely been murkier. Here are five questions about branches, layoffs, technology and revenues that bankers need to be asking.
March 12 -
JPMorgan Chase on Tuesday convened its top executives to discuss its growth strategies. Expansion will be hard as it cuts 17,000 jobs over two years, wrestles with new regulations and rethinks branching.
February 26 -
Former Wal-Mart financial services head Jane Thompson praises the innovative customer service and design of some bank branches - especially at the now-defunct Washington Mutual Inc.
December 12
CARLSBAD, Calif. — JPMorgan Chase's (JPM) strategy for building a better consumer bank comes down to lots of feedback, lots of travel and a little bit of beer.
"Over the course of the last three years I've met with every one of our branch managers in person three times. … We go on road trips, we even bring [Chief Executive Jamie Dimon] on the road trip with us," Ryan McInerney, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase's (JPM) consumer bank, said on Thursday.
During those meetings with the branch managers, "maybe we'll give them a beer or two, and they'll loosen up, because Jamie can be a little intimidating sometimes," McInerney added. "And then they'll start gushing with all this stuff that's broken."
Those meetings ultimately yielded more than a cumulative 700 changes to the consumer bank's products and services, McInerney told an audience of about 300 bankers and industry members at the annual
JPMorgan Chase is
McInerney spent his speech describing the bank's efforts to improve those locations and the bank's overall consumer reputation, starting with an internal meeting three years ago when most attendees confronted the fact that JPMorgan Chase's employees got the highest number of complaints for being "rude."
"We had significantly insufficient focus on our customers," McInerney recalled. "We had pretty poor performance on third-party surveys."
Besides improving the attitude of employees who deal with customers, McInerney's team also met with several companies outside of the banking industry, to see how Southwest Airlines, the Container Store, Ritz-Carlton Hotels, Apple and Google treat their customers.
"A lot of what we're doing today has been influenced by this customer experience, and things we learned from companies we visited," McInerney said.
He also praised Washington Mutual, which was known for its untraditional "Occasio" branches before its collapse and sale to JPMorgan during the financial crisis. JPMorgan has recently opened some new locations with similar features to the Occasio branches, including an open floor plan.
"We're extraordinarily lucky to have Washington Mutual - we've taken lots from it," McInerney said. But as for the Occasio branches, "parts of them might have been ahead of their time, and parts of them were just poorly designed," he said.
