J.D. Power and Associates has released its 2009 Retail Banking Satisfaction Study, which measures satisfaction amongst consumer-bank customers in the U.S.
The verdict: customers are not happy. In fact, they’re 6% less satisfied with their banking experience than they were in 2007.
That alone is not terribly surprising. One, people love to hate easy targets, whether it’s [...]

This article is an excerpt from John Ryan’s upcoming “Bank Marketer’s Guide to Digital Signage.”

Why digital signage?
In a word, it’s about communication. Digital signage provides banks with a way to communicate with customers with more frequency, relevance and efficiency than ever before.
Don’t panic…it’s only marketing!
For bank marketers who have worked primarily with traditional media, [...]

Next time you consider using focus groups to determine what new services or products your customers want, consider first the case of Howard Moskowitz.
As best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell explains in his TED Talk below, Moskowitz revolutionized the U.S. food industry in the 1970s by studying consumers’ reactions to 45 different styles of spaghetti sauce. What [...]

In a recent study for a major North American bank, we interviewed both customers and branch staff to find out what, in their opinion, could be done to improve the bank.
Staff suggestions on how to improve sales effectiveness:

“Digital screens with bank messages on them.”
“Better product information — closer to customers.”
“Reduce clutter — customers feel overwhelmed.”
“Cater [...]

Great rate. But these posters are worthless the minute rate changes.*
1. Breadth and depth of shelf space
Need a new message? Need 100 new messages? No problem. Digital media (a.k.a. digital signage) offers virtually unlimited shelf space. That means more messages per customer visit and a greater ability to tell a story (e.g., how’s your bank [...]

The Future of Branches – Jeffry Pilcher hits it out the park with this slide show, which is filled with lots of eye and mind candy. Rather than calling for futuristic branch design or technology for it’s own sake, the presentation implores banks and credit unions to change their idea of how a branch should [...]

Yesterday,  American Banker shed some light on the little in-store branches that could. And will. Despite a history of many opponents declaring them undersized, unimportant, and even blemishes on their brands, many in-store branches seem to be proving themselves to be more profitable and appealing than their traditional counterparts.
With as many as 15,000 to 25,000 [...]

New York, L.A., Honolulu, Chicago … St. Cloud, Minnesota?
We were as surprised as anyone to discover that ING Direct, the online bank with 7.5 million customers and $82 billion in assets, had one of their famous ING Direct Cafes here in Minnesota — not even in the state’s major metro area, but in university town [...]

American Banker points out (registration required) that since July 2008, searches on Google for “FDIC” spiked at least tenfold on two separate occasions:

Early to Mid July, 2008, which corresponds with the July 11 failure of IndyMac
Late Sept. 2009, which corresponds with the Sept. 25 OTS seizure of Washington Mutual and Citigroup’s Sept. 29 announcement of [...]