Title: What Do We Do for an Encore? A Game Plan to Recapture Market Share Lost to Nonbank Competitors
Abstract: By Edward E. Furash The standard banking strategies of the moment focus heavily on mergers, centralized consolidation, slash-andburn cost cutting, and high-quality customer service. These are actions for banks trying to survive in the ever-shrinking share of the financial services market they operate in. Most bankers putting their organizations through these ordeals feel uneasy, wondering if ensuring survival of their institutions in banking's shrinking world is enough, concerned that they must do more to ensure for their institutions a vibrant role in the future financial services industry. The challenge defined Their concern is well-founded. Four forces are destroying commercial banks--unwise laws and regulations, the fragmentation of intermediation, customer enthusiasm for new ways of doing business, and new technologies that are transforming markets. Cutting costs, consolidating, and improving customer service are corrective actions that do not deal fundamentally with any of these forces. That is the grim problem challenging bank managers today. Their hardwon solutions fail to counter the trends eroding their viability, and banking's market continues to shrink. Many say that unwise laws and regulations are the banking industry's biggest problem. Banks are not allowed to enter businesses where they can compete directly with the nonbanks that are taking away their market share. Regulations raise the cost of doing business to levels where banks become noncompetitive. All that is true, but even if regulation went away completely, banks would still face the fragmentation of their traditional intermediation business, changing customer attitudes and new technologies. One solution is for banks to give up their charters. This is a real strategic option that many institutions are considering. But given the mood of Congress and the current Administration to wrap in and regulate the parallel banking system that has developed, even this choice may be pyrrhic. Obviously, banking is at a crossroads. That phrase has been used many times in the past. This time it is both true and life threatening. Either the erosion will continue or banks will begin to win back an expanding role in the financial services industry. Clearly, erosion is unacceptable. Shareholder value must be enhanced, not diminished. This requires reinventing the bank so that it becomes the prime provider in its market of both traditional banking functions and innovative financial services. It's what bankers must do for an encore. Use your advantages The key to reinvention is realizing that a bank must be able to deliver itself to customers when, where and how they want it. All banking products and information must be built around the customer. Analysts frequently tally up the advantages nonbank competitors have in the markets, including less restrictive regulation, nationwide distribution systems, and sophisticated marketing. Bank advantages are cited less frequently. But banks are envied--almost feared--by nonbank competitors. The latter have scored most of their victories against banks with narrow investment products or one-shot loans which are widely spaced over time and where the customer must be resold. Nonbank competitors know they do not understand customers as well as banks do. But they are gaining, and some are well ahead of banks in understanding customer behavior and motivation. Aware of their own deficiencies, nonbanks can be put on the defensive by bankers who stop being discouraged by the shrinking market and emphasize their own product and customer relationship advantages vigorously. Transaction accounts, for example, are needed and generate relatively low-cost funds. Nonbanks can and do simulate them effectively. But banks offer the real thing and control access to the payments system as well. Also, bankers have superior skill in underwriting credit risk and can deal with the other kinds of complex risk encountered in financial services today. …
Publication Year: 1993
Publication Date: 1993-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
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