BAI named Extraco Banks’ James Geeslin
Maverick Banker of the Year 2011 for driving a top-to-bottom
transformation of his bank’s operations. His mission: to simplify
the existing branch model to make it easier for customers and staff
to do business – and do it more efficiently. Charles
Davis reports
Go deeper with GlobalData
Sometimes the best ideas
are born of frustration, and a dose of regulatory pain.
James Geeslin, vice
chairman and chief sales officer at Extraco Banks, a $1.2bn
institution headquartered in Waco, Texas, was reassessing the
bank’s retail business in the aftermath of all the regulatory
changes dampening the bank’s fee revenue when something dawned on
him.
“Lobby traffic is
decreasing for most banks, but in ways that make it terribly
inefficient,” says Geeslin.
“Now had my fee income
stayed the same the rest of my life, I would have had no pain level
to adjust to, and who knows if this ever happens. But we began
rethinking our lobbies, and that led to Swarm Banking.
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By GlobalDataGeeslin, a weekend
rancher, said the analogy to a swarm of bees was
intentional.
‘If you walked into a
bank lobby, there is a lot of granite and marble, a library-like
atmosphere with tellers perched behind a counter and relationship
bankers waiting for someone to find their way to them,” he said.
“No one was swarming you, that’s for sure.”
Geeslin also began
paying careful attention to his experiences at other retailers,
from Starbucks to Best Buy to Home Depot, and saw an increasing
reliance on technology to ease repetitive transactions and increase
face time with personnel.
The result was a
patent-pending process, Swarm Banking, a top-down transformation of
the retail branch operation at Extraco. Geeslin’s strategy included
changes in floor plan layout, deposit-handling technology and
employee hiring and training.
Swarm Banking certainly
seems to be working: customer satisfaction is up 20%, employee
retention is up (Geeslin said turnover is down 60%) and transaction
times have been cut in half. And the most important goal of all, to
him, is being met: every customer that walks into an Extraco branch
is being greeted and assisted within five seconds.
Extraco recently became
one of 18 banks around the world to be named a 2011 Celent Model
Bank, receiving recognition for its Swarm Banking strategy as well
as for a host of other innovations.
Swarm Banking was the
outgrowth of a multi-year plan aimed at improving its multichannel
delivery effectiveness, which has resulted din technological
upgrades throughout the bank.
Customers use high-end
cash recycling kiosks from Talaris in the lobby, or chat via video
screen with experts in other branches or the bank’s Customer Care
Center.
Its online banking
channel now offers online account opening, online lending, live
chat, and a life event assistance tool. The majority of its ATMs
have been replaced with deposit automation units.
Its branch channel has
been transformed through technology, organisational redesign, and
rigorous workflow improvements, the most significant of which was a
move away from the traditional teller/relationship manager
dichotomy to what Extraco calls “universal bankers” – cross-trained
personnel that can handle transactional details as well as open
accounts, cross-sell and offer advice.
“Everyone in the branch
can do everyone else’s job,” Geeslin said. “Our folks are having
more fun, I’m paying them a bit more because they are doing more
for us, and we’re much more productive.”
Geeslin said that the
universal banker positions appeal to today’s youth, who form the
core of the bank’s hiring. Equipped with headsets, they can
reposition one another as throughout the branch as needs
arise.
“Our younger employees
don’t want to stand behind a counter and count cash all day,” he
said. “They want to move around, and be challenged, and interact
with customers and use the latest technology.”
To find the ideal
candidates, Extraco completely revamped its hiring process. A panel
of bank personnel reviews applications, and conducts anywhere form
three to six interviews with each candidate, who then are often
given some task to perform for the panel. The applicant also must
provide 10 references, each of which also is contacted.
“It’s an exhausting
process, but we have found this is absolutely essential to the
success of the program,” he said. “What we are trying to get to is
the core truth…is this person happy? Are they comfortable with
change? We used to just have people fill out apps and pick a few,
so this is a huge change for us, a huge commitment. We are now at
about an 80-to-1 ratio of applicants to hires.”
If a candidate survives
that grueling interview process, they then undergo 12 weeks of
training in which they work in every aspect of the bank, from the
floor to the Customer Care Center. Trainees work in different
branches, and in a variety of roles, and are evaluated and mentored
daily.
The result of all of
this, Geeslin said, is a reinvigorated branch banking network, one
in which the counter is the last option, not the first, and ne in
which bankers can be deployed daily throughout the 16-branch
network where needed.
Geeslin, who was awarded the title 2011 Maverick Banker of the Year
by Bank Administration Institute for his design and leadership of
Swarm Banking, said another surprising offshoot of the Swarm
Banking concept is Extraco’s budding consultancy
business.
“We had bankers from all
over the country wanting to come in and see what we were doing, and
after six months or so, it dawned on us that we had a whole system
here we could deploy,” Geeslin said.
“So we took a couple of
experienced bankers who helped build the Swarm Banking strategy and
started a consulting business out of it. It’s turned in to one of
the best things we have done here, and we have them out all over
the place consulting on the programme.”
Finalists for the BAI
Maverick Banker of the Year award also included: Trent Spurgeon,
senior vice president of Consumer Product & Segment Management,
US Bancorp, Minneapolis and Linda Verba, executive vice president,
retail operations and service recognition, TD Bank Group
