A new leaf for the bank branch

In 1997 a Canadian bank opened a café. That same year, a fledgling American online bookstore held an IPO and implicitly made its position clear on brick-and-mortar bookstores and their cafés.

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Times were changing. But they were changing differently in different sectors. A bookstore with a café seemed passé; a bank with a café seemed pioneering. Retailers were being transformed by technology while bank branches were unaffected.

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Almost a quarter century later, technology caught up with banking. Bank branches and retailers now find themselves on a similar page.

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Where cafés persist, they are neither passé nor pioneering. They are just appropriate complements to in-person experiences as brick-and-mortar asserts its role in an increasingly online world. The challenge is how to define exactly what that in-person experience should entail.

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To an extent, bank branches can follow retailers with their experiential stores that bridge inventory-light showrooms offline with immersive commerce online. But the sectors are different, and simple emulation will not suffice.

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Read on