What the branch of the future will be?

Abstract

On August 29th, a week before I took off to go to India for three months, I navigate on my bank’s website and I consult my online account. I read the documentation to know what the different offers are for the students who go abroad and I sent an email to my advisor. A few days later I received a new contract and the new credit card which fits more my needs. In a decade the world has deeply changed, this common event in retail banking would have been impossible only ten years ago. Now the Internet is in every household and we all have a mobile device on us which keeps us connected with the rest of the world. Even us, our needs and our desires have evolved, we prefer having distant contacts to having to move to the bank and we demand flexibility and speed. Retail banking had to evolve in the same way, and we no longer need to queue up for hours as our parents did to make an operation. Although, the different banks don’t intend to close their counters, and actually a few new concepts emerge which try to anticipate the new tendencies and to hinder the growing distance between a bank and its customers. These new concepts give more importance to the exchange and the contact between a seller and its customer. Lounge areas and cafés are integrated in the bank, new means to improve the exchange are invented and set up, in a nutshell the bank counter will not disappear but it is transformed into something which would better meet the customer’s expectations. It evolves from a dull place where people had to go from time to time into a pleasant environment where you can think and find advice to make your projects come true. There is a shift taking place in retail banking, every bank has to find a new image and create their own concept to get the best market position in this new redistribution of cards and of market shares. We will try to analyze through this study the tendencies which appear in the retail banking market, to understand the forces at work which build these new needs and the stakes of this evolution. Then we will focus on the different strategies implemented by the banks and we will especially pay attention to the French market where a few agents have made a first move. Finally we will try to define the bank of the future, to anticipate the limits of these new models and to forecast the evolution of different market such as India’s.