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Area Gets An All-Day Bank Fight
The PNC Bank at 1919 Pennsylvania Ave. is handy to Starbucks, whose space was carved out of the branch.
(By Robert A. Reeder -- The Washington Post)
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"Some people come to our job fairs and say, "Whoa, this is not for me," said Grace Migliaccio, senior vice president for human resources at Commerce, who is a former Disney theme-park manager. "But there's that one for every nine that just love it."
Employees who receive the most "wow" awards get stock options and recognition at an annual extravaganza in Philadelphia. Commerce also employs a tactic widely used in the retail business but relatively unknown in banking: mystery shoppers. It employs 260 full-time mystery shoppers, 15 of whom are being trained for the Washington market, to go into branches posing as customers. The results are read by management in daily dispatches.
Commerce gets 2,000 to 3,000 employment applications week, and hires a tenth of them. In Washington, it has hired 45 people, more than half of whom came from retailers, not banks.
Commerce's interest in Washington isn't unusual. Virtually every major bank in the country has tried to be a player here, as evidenced by the wave of acquisitions of Washington's banks in the past decade. PNC's purchase of Riggs was the latest.
Commerce, however, is taking the unusual tack of opening all its own branches: It has never entered a market by buying an existing bank. Commerce's deposits rose more than $8 billion last year, all of it by stealing business from other banks in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia.
Bank executives don't like to admit it, but in private they acknowledge that customer bargaining power is increasing, that a well-timed complaint about a fee often will result in a bank eliminating it in order to keep the business. That's especially true in the Washington market, where banks compete for wealthy, highly educated depositors.
The key for banks, said Lillian S. Kilroy, chief marketing officer of Provident, a Baltimore-based consumer bank that has made the Washington market its primary growth target, is to get the checking account. "While they may have come to us initially for a free checking product, that gives us an opportunity to show what we can do with service and convenience," she said. "That's when you do the cross-selling."
"I think customers honestly expect a whole lot more today," said Brian R. Monday, a longtime area banker who was hired this year hired to run Commerce Bank's Washington operations. "You're going to find that people's expectations are that they should have an opportunity for free services, that they should be treated as an individual."
