The branch-based banking model is dead (UPDATE)

Here’s a summary of the presentation I gave at the conference this week.

The headline is that the traditional model of banking is dead, long live the new bank model.

The dead model is the one where 80% of costs of retailing are in stores (branches).

Branch based banking is dead.

Branches are not dead ... just the concept of branch-based banking per se.

UPDATE: the critical point here (which some are missing - see comments) is that branches are not dead.  You still need some for sales and relationships.  But about a tenth of the number that most banks have today as the majority are just administration or transaction outlets that can be automated.

For those who read the blog regularly , you’ll know what I mean but, just in case, the point is that 8 out of 10 branches were opened as administration centres to service the transaction needs of communities. Those needs are now being self-serviced so what are those transaction centres there for?

In particular, as 95% of customer contact is now being delivered remotely through technology channels, including corporate customers, this should mean that at least 80% of the cost goes into the staffing, processes and technology used in those channels.

In other words, 80% of the old bank operational costs for retailing were in branches. Today, it should be in technology channels.

But there’s more to it than that.

It’s about relationship and connections.

People get technology today not because it’s gadgets but because it is connecting their lives to the lives of countless friends and strangers.

This is why Facebook can go from nothing to a place with the population of the United States in under four years, and why Twitter can go from off-the-radar to on-everyone’s-radar in just under a year.

Last year, no-one mentioned Twitter.

Today, it’s an integral part of the show.

But it’s only integral because it helps people manage, share and organise their lives and loves.

And that’s what banks have to do if they are to reconnect. They must connect people to their money and finances in a simple and easy way.

The presentation draws on all the materials you can find in our directory of social finance, and is themed around the human connections that make up our lives.

This is why each point ends with human faces, as that’s what it’s all about, and empty branches, as that’s what it’s all about.

By way of a little more explanation of the flow.

To start with, today’s kids see the computer and its operating system as a history lesson.

They don’t care how technology works, just as I don’t care how electricity works.

I just like what it can do, and that’s how kids see technology.

They also see banks as a history lesson.

Their grandparents went into branches, their parents used ATMs and they just think of money and banking as being like Mint, an internet service that organises their finances for them.

What’s a bank branch for therefore?

Equally, everyone keeps referring to the Facebook and Twitter generation, or the twitfaced generation as some might call them.

Who are the twitfaced generation?

They’re not the under 25’s.

They’re not the under 35’s.

They are the over 35’s.

Most Facebook and Twitter users are average age of 40.

So when we talk about social networks, we are not talking about the next generation of customers. We are talking about the current generation.

If anything, the new generation of customers should be called “the Mob”, as they are all about being mobile connected youth (the Mobile Youth website is brilliant if you want more on that).

So what we’re really saying is that you need to completely rethink the bank around social technologies and rethink the branch network by closing most of it down and reinvesting that saving into social finance.

If you don’t, you’re dead.

Give it less than a decade, and you’re dead.

I’m serious.

Mainstream media fought this battle ... and lost.

That’s why television and newspapers are shutting down by the bucket load as today’s media is created by me on YouTube and Typepad.

So stop fighting the lost bank cause of the branch network.

Rethink it.

Keep the branches you need for sales, and shut the rest down.

Replace them with ATMs.

Equally, start thinking about new ideas such as microtransactions.

A billion iPhone app downloads in nine months.

Charge 50 cents a download and you’ve generated $500 million.

That’s the future.

It’s the grains of sand that will build the future.

And some banks get this stuff.

eBank and Jibun Bank in Japan; Wells Fargo and Bank of America in the USA; BBVA, Caja Navarro and a few others in Europe; but these are few and far between.

By way of example, I’m still waiting for my bank to start a blog or anything ... instead I just have a locked out website with activation codes that don’t work (long story).

In summary, the bank of the future will connect with me intimately via my mobile lifestyle 24*7. They will not only be proactive, but predictive of my needs and will provide me with a connection not just to a payment or to my money, but to my financial lifestyle.

That’s what MINT is doing today and BBVA has delivered too, but it requires bravery to go down this route.

Being brave by shutting down transaction centres, opening hi-touch 21st century sales centres and pushing the rest down a common technology platform that supports access via mobile, laptop, music player, television, car ... any internet-enable device basically.

And this changes your business model as the old model would involve massive investment in the business case to launch new technology platforms.

Today, technology is free and disposable.

So get on with it.

Retail bankers of the world, unite.

Shut down the branches and bite the bullet.

Stop fighting the old fight and start focusing on the future.

Otherwise you’re just dead meat, and who are we all going to sell to then?

The mobile phone companies?

p.s. as mentioned, all the case studies supporting this can be found at our directory of social finance