1995 report looks at banking priorities
Banks more often assign a high importance to retail than to wholesale banking, according to findings of ABA's 1995 National Retail Operations and Automation Survey Report. Banks also more often pursue a focus on their local communities than on a region-wide basis. The report groups 254 responding banks into four categories according to asset size and summarizes their plans for current and future technology and other operational concerns.
Important strategic objectives to respondents included offering a full range of products, achieving a dominant market share and low operating costs. Less attractive to the surveyed banks were strategies pursuing leadership in technology or offering high-value services at high prices.
Some other findings include:
- ATMs as common self-service options: Automated teller machines are by far the most commonly offered or planned self-service options. Sixty-seven percent of banks currently offer access to ATMs, with an additional 8 percent planning to do so in the next two years. Self-service depositories, bill payment and full-statement printing are next most common, each either offered or planned within the next two years by between 30 and 40 percent of banks.
- PC-based small business banking: Although currently offered by less than 40 percent of respondents, the rest of the banks said they planned to offer off-premise, PC-based banking for small businesses, both on-line and offline, within the next two years.
- Changing role of branch locations: The report concludes that consumer acceptance of electronic banking and self-service in general has led banks to redefine the role of their branches and has driven their use of technology. Among technologies most commonly deployed or planned in branch automation are teller and platform systems. Also common for branch automation are fax, microfiche and imaging systems, although microfiche is seldom planned for future use.
- Outsourcing: The survey examined banks' tendency to outsource certain processing services. Results indicate that, in general, the larger the institution, the less likely it is to outsource services, except for bank-card processing and ATM-driver systems. Further, the report notes declines from the prior survey, in all size categories, in the number of banks planning to outsource.
- Imaging: Close to half (46 percent) of large banks (those with assets of more than $5 billion) in the survey currently use imaging systems. Among the two middle-size categories (banks with assets between $300 million and $999 million and those with assets between $1 billion and $5 billion), between 80 and 90 percent of respondents plan to install imaging systems.
Copyright © 1995 Bank Operations Bulletin. Originally appeared in Bank Operations Bulletin, April, 1995.
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