Abstract: Are there any other three-letter words that connote so many cozy, happy thoughts in so short a space as pie? Make it pizza and you've got the ultimate social leveler--no one can put on airs when they are eating a hot slice with their hands. Make it apple and you've got an American cliche and a favorite, all in one crust. Make it chicken pot and you've got the stuff of warm childhood memories. Make it cream and mix with the Three Stooges and you've got belly laughs. Make it a share pie and maybe you've got cozy feelings too. Or maybe, instead, you've got a bellyache, if you think your slice is too thin, or all crust and no filling. Or maybe, instead, you've got a management decision to make: What slice of the pie do you go after with limited resources? But let's also consider another meaning of pie. Back when printing was done with lead type, it was hand set, letter by letter. Inevitably a careless apprentice would drop an entire trayful. The master printer would present the youngster with the dubious pleasures of pie, that is, a mass of jumbled type, a veritable salad of random words and letters, that would take hours to sort back into the proper pigeonholes of a printer's typecase. Community bankers have had to sort through their own such pie. There has always been someone peddling a theory about how they should change their institutions to better maximize profits. Go for this slice and ignore the rest. Go for that slice and do it this way and quadruple your assets. All the while, competitors large and small, specialized and generalized, have tried to dig their own pie cutters into the pastry, and the devil take the hindmost. In this, the ninth edition of the ABA Banking Journal/ABA Community Bankers Council Community Bank Competitiveness Survey, we've tried--often with the assistance of pie charts, naturally--to put the heaviest emphasis on the filling of the pie that many bankers pursue--the consumer customer. Much of what's in this year's report deals with who community banks go after, how they deal with evolving markets, how they deal with slices that aren't as tasty as they might be, and how they tinker with ways of doing it all. We also look at the selection that bankers bake up to present to business, trust, and investment customers as well. (Note: In the asset-size breakout tables in many of the exhibits, there are two renditions of the large bank category. The $201 million-up category is our traditional large-bank grouping. We've added a $500 million-up grouping, at the request of many larger banks that wanted a finer breakdown. KEY CUSTOMERS, TODAY AND TOMORROW What sells now, what may sell then BANKING'S PRIME SLICE As shown in Exhibit 1, p. S1, for many banks the prime market slice is 30-55 year-olds, although in some regions the mix is more evenly divided among age groups. But, when bankers were asked who their future prime customers would be, even more identified the 30-55 year-olds as their slice. Interestingly, although we live in what has often been called a youth-oriented culture, bankers don't prioritize the under-30s and don't plan to, as a rule. Younger people may dictate what's at the movies and on television and at the mall, but to paraphrase that line that Willie Sutton actually never said, They are not where the money is. At least not so far as banks care. This is not to say they aren't served, but to say that bankers are realists. As Exhibit 8 on page S6 shows, more than half of the banks responding take special steps to begin cultivating customers when they are young. But, as the bar chart in the exhibit shows, this is not a profit center, but an investment in the future. Financial education dominates the approaches taken, in hopes that an educated consumer will ultimately be a good banking customer. The 30-55s clearly represent, for most bankers, the deepest potential market for both traditional credit services as well as many noninterest income sources. …
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
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