Originally published at CBInsight
Today’s community banking environment is wrought with challenges. Whether its regulators, customer demands, or compliance burden, every day can be tough. Today I wanted to discuss a strategic way to grow your bank without adding the costly overhead of branches and staff. It solves one of the key challenges in the market, the commercial customer. The retail or commercial client has long been one of the best revenue sources for most banks. Whether it be analysis checking fees, handling fees, lending revenue or other treasury services, there is no doubt it’s a great path to success for your bank to grow that line of business. So how can your bank do that better than anyone else in the area? Let’s find out.
Retail cash capture is not unlike remote deposit capture for checks. The retail or commercial client would have a device in their location that is accepting, in this case, cash and transmitting the total for deposit back to you. Simple enough right? Well aren’t all the armored cars offering this product today? Maybe you have looked into this before and your customers have told you they aren’t willing to pay the fees to do that program. Maybe they don’t like Loomis or Brinks or whoever you have chosen to partner with to offer the service. So you abandoned it, little value offered for a fee your customers weren’t willing to pay. Game Over. Or is it?
A new line of products is coming to market that actually delivers a greater value to your client’s business than just being able to remotely deposit cash. While that’s a nice feature and is still part of the new solution, the new products actually help the client operate better. By adding recycling capability to the safe, not only can the secure device simply accept notes to be deposited, it can actually manage cash more effectively in the store. With internal theft and shrinkage being a challenge for a lot of retailers, the recycling solution allows an audit trail of all incoming and outgoing cash the cashiers need. The manager is also freed up from “managing” the drawers and handling change orders for cashiers because the machine is doing it for them. This allows the manager to focus on the more important tasks of helping the store run better. Every good retail business knows it runs better when the manager is out in the customer area and not in a back room counting or handling cash.
With new recycling solutions for small to medium size retailers that are affordable or in-line with deposit only solutions from the armored car companies, you can actually be an innovator in the space and drive the ship instead of simply reselling someone else’s program. Even with solutions that can scale to larger retailers like grocery stores, the value only grows for them because they have a need for more internal cash management than the smaller retailers. You can offer a unique value proposition to your customers and prospects that will truly differentiate you from your competition.
Lastly, the safes do communicate remotely which is a vital part if you don’t have a branch nearby. Now, your footprint is close to limitless. That franchisee that you only handle part of his business, you can now handle all of it. That lucrative county or city government that you’d love to have that is too expensive to courier their work every day, can now be a feasible customer to you. You can grow your customer base without building branches and depending on which armored car or courier service you use to pick up the cash, they may even process it for you, eliminating that cash from ever hitting your existing branch network. So revenue growth, mixed with minimal cost increase, and a huge value-added solution to your client can be the spark you need to grow in this challenging environment and add profit to your bottom line.