Correspondent Blog

Bankers love easy. Who doesn’t want an easy way to have a more profitable bank? We also love to keep things simple. It is a common refrain. Compounding the problem is that in banking, we often think that “simple” and “easy” as synonymous. In this article, we will touch on innovation, technology and banking strategy…

For inspiration in banking innovation, we often look to other industries. Honkook Kim and his Gentle Monster Brand is a perfect example. With financial hardship, competition from dominant players, and a startup budget, Gentle Monster faced many of the same challenges as a community bank. Instead of thinking traditionally, Gentle Monster pursued a strategy of…

It is a dangerous troupe in banking that an omnichannel approach is best. The concept that we allow the customer to choose how they want to bank often enables the bank to be passive in its position and give up agency. Branching, for example, is too expensive to be all things to all people. In…

These days, if you want to make tough branch decisions, use a good college student instead of an experienced banker. We will come back to the college student but, in this post, we pitted experienced bankers against the latest branch models against the latest machine learning applications to see which method was more accurate at…

The combination of the greater pandemic-induced adoption of banking technology, higher branch operating costs, a greater number of workers working from their homes, and the changing needs of those workers, has altered branch mathematics and profitability. In this article, we look at the game theory behind branching and why there is a new equation for…