Future Retail Banking:"tellers" to "Sellers"

Here's good news for us all: the banking industry itself is, after years of downgrading that brick and mortar outpost, starting to take a fresh look at the branch. The reason? The meeting of two desires: customers wanting a real-life face to sit with when discussing complex products like investments or mortgages and banks wanting to maximise earnings per customer. The whole area is being discussed widely across the industry under the 'tellers to sellers' maxim.

And that is giving IT vendors to banks a lot of new opportunities--from CRM (customer relationship management) systems to applications that automate the simple transactions that currently occupy most of the time of those tellers. They also need training, of course.

You might have clearly understood till now that I am talking about the revolutionary mode of banking i.e Retail Banking, which is expected to hold tremendous future potential, and what will be the interesting trend, let's have a look.

The issue of retail banking in India is extremely important and topical. Across the globe, retail lending has been a spectacular innovation in the commercial banking sector in recent years. The growth of retail lending, especially, in emerging economies, is attributable to the rapid advances in information technology, the evolving macroeconomic environment, financial market reform, and several micro-level demand and supply side factors.

India is experienced a surge in retail banking. There are various pointers towards this. Retail loan is estimated to have accounted for nearly one-fifth of all bank credit. Housing sector is experiencing a boom in its credit. The retail loan market has decisively got transformed from a sellers’ market to a buyers’ market. Gone are the days where getting a retail loan was somewhat cumbersome. All these emphasise the momentum that retail banking is experiencing in the Indian economy in recent years.

Take a look at one challenge in this brave new world: moving tellers from their existing functions to being able to act as skilled consultants with good interpersonal skills. At present, their job consists largely of balancing the need to service individual customers whilst ensuring that said customers move swiftly along to ease the pressure on the growing line of other customers. This 'teller' function is clearly at odds with the 'seller' function of spending quality, reasonably open-ended time with a single customer to discuss pension options, for example. The key question for a bank, therefore, is this: how do you mix the need for rapid processing of simple transactions with the ability to spend time with each customer?

Now we've seen this transition happening for some time--the use of ATMs, for instance, to enable customers to withdraw cash, query balances and, to some extent, pay bills via a 24X7 machine has relieved the queue pressure on sellers to some extent.

But the next stage of this customer automation--deposits via a drop-in safe--has met with much customer resistance, despite its use for years in a business context as the 'night safe'. In this area, people feel more comfortable dealing with a real life interaction rather than trusting their hard-won cash to a dark shaft with no reassuring receipt.

Hence the rise of 'meet and greeters' between the branch's street door and the tellers. These greeters become the first point of contact with customers and can then direct them to self-service machines or introduce them to an advisor with the required product skills.