Comments on: Bankers 1, WaMu 0

By: dball

dball — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:32:19 +0000

Staid Banker (great handle, by the way): Thanks for your comments. I agree that we need to avoid “retailification” for its own sake. The point in undertaking any retail marketing effort is to move the needle on tangible business goals. Some of those goals are going to be sales and profit oriented, in which case we will expect short-term results, measured in sales conversations, product inquiries and, ultimately, sales. But it’s also valid to use retailing in service of longer term branding and PR goals (so long as they’re tied to tangible business goals).

Haven’t seen the chaos you described, but it makes me wonder how the branches were piloted and tested prior to rollout. It would be great to hear from someone involved in the design and deployment process — I’ll bet they’d have plenty of stories to tell!

By: staid banker

staid banker — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:32:32 +0000

Just my two cents, but I find it hard to call WaMu’s Occasio concept “groundbreaking.” The reality is that it was a failed experiment. The innovation in queue management proved disasterous: if you’ve ever been in a WaMu at lunch hour you’ll know that lines form for the tellers AND the cash machines, with confusion abounding. In addition, WaMu’s cross-sell rates (and sales rates in general) in Occasio markets were among the lowest in the industry; hard to say that constitutes a “favorable opportunity”…

While I disagree with Charlie Scharf’s comment that traditional branches are “superior in every way,” I think the reality is that the industry over-emphasized the retail-ification of its branches, without regard to what actual works in a banking environment…

By: The Financial Brand » Blog Archive » Why Chase is killing WaMu’s retail concept

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:29:06 +0000

[...] Reading: John Ryan, one of the world’s leading financial architectural firms, published a blog post about Chase’s decision to kill WaMu’s branches just [...]