A Return to Managing Customer Relationships Available to Purchase

Argues the need for banks to re‐create the “relationship banker”. Over the last 20 years development has been in making acquisitions, centralization and specialization in order to obtain the full benefits of automation. Increasing competition has produced a glut of “lifestyle” advertising to segment customer bases, but these may be widely regarded as only cosmetic changes. Recommends the need to create a corporate culture based on satisfying or exceeding customer expectations. A centralized structure may still operate as a transmission‐and transaction‐processing “factory”; a parallel less cumbersome structure is needed to allow flexible and rapid response to customers′ needs. Discusses these in detail and embodies the latter in the old‐style branch manager.