Recent Articles

How Retail Banking Can Avoid A "Southwest" Meltdown

What lessons can Bank and Credit Union leaders can learn from the recent failures at Southwest Airlines?

Next-Gen Scheduling For Branch Staff

Scheduling branch staff today presents challenges that did not exist a few years ago. . . .

How Much Branch Time Is Wasted?

For many financial institutions this is a rhetorical question, because they have no idea. . . .

Teller Performance Measurement

With the changing landscape and new technologies in branch operations, teller performance measurement is more important than ever . . .

Small Enough To Care

For a community financial institution Small Enough to Care is a meaningful statement. It means that your community is a big deal and a foundation of your culture.

3 Ideas To Reduce Branch Overhead

There are often overlooked opportunities when you sweat the small stuff.

Forecasting: Science And Art

Forecasting is a quantitative process, but there is also art to creating a good forecast.

What's New in StaffPro Version 5.4

The article summarizes the new features available in StaffPro v5.4.

View From The Hamster Wheel

The article discusses how to understand and deal with improvements to branch operations being stymied because employees are so buried under tasks already on their plate, that there is no chance anything new can be considered.

Opportunities for Process Automation

An easy way to identify tasks that are candidates for process automation is to ask three questions.

Float Staff - Not Just Tellers Anymore

The new float staff: Sharing high skill employees between branches can save costs and improve service.

Sales and Cross-sell Goals versus Performance Measurement

The Wells Fargo debacle shows that when a sales goal program runs amuck REALLY bad things can happen. What is a better strategy?

A Full Court Press To Improve Productivity

After more obvious efforts have been done, continuing to improve productivity requires a combination of knowledge, creativity, commitment and technology.

The Objective Is Service

The true objective of branch transformation is to deliver the best service as efficiently and cost effectively as possible.

Automating Exception Handling

Technology has long been applied to loan document exceptions, but financial institutions must handle exceptions in many areas.

Challenges of Universal Branch Staffing

One common strategy to address the changing branch environment is to implement a universal staffing model. . . .

Branch Performance Measurement

Branch networks are evolving and the rate of change is accelerating. You cannot improve what you cannot see.

StaffPro cash automation metrics

It is hard to improve the productivity of processes that are not measured, and cash automation is no exception.

Evaluating the benefits of teller cash automation

With the cost effectiveness of branch cash automation varying from one branch to another, how confident are you that branch cash automation is the right fit for your branch?

Hidden opportunities to improve branch efficiency

Branch efficiency opportunities don't always come from large sweeping transformations, but from optimizing, standardizing, and measuring many over-looked smaller tasks that represent a large portion of branch operations.

CUinsight Features Member Services Article Contributed By Point Enterprises, Inc.

Members are at the very core of Credit Union identity. Banks have customers, Credit Unions have members. It is no surprise that the topic of “member services” is one of the most important discussions at all levels of CU management and staff…

Automating Image System Indexing

An accounting department scans accounts payable (AP) documents for image system storage. For the images . . . .

Are Your Vendors On Your Side?

Implementing software is a commitment in money and time. The quality of the client-vendor relationship can have a significant effect on how successful the investment is over the long term . . . .

Maintaining Branch Profitability in a Changing Environment

No matter whether you think branch transformation will occur in five years or fifty, it makes sense to maximize the contribution of the existing branch network to the institution’s success. . . .

BAI Banking Strategies Features Analytics Article Contributed by Point Enterprises, Inc.

While business analytics and the art world seem like they have little to do with each other, in fact they share a number of key characteristics...

Making Analytics Work

Analytics are typically viewed as a way for management to better understand how the organization is performing. That is an important objective, but there are other ways to look at it . . .

StaffPro v5.1: What's New

StaffPro Branch Resource Management now incorporates several entirely new features and multiple feature improvements. Many of StaffPro’s new features are geared toward furthering its already powerful automation capabilities...

BAI Banking Strategies Features Branch PTO Article Contributed by Point Enterprises, Inc.

Managing and scheduling Personal Time Off (PTO) days has long been a challenge for financial institutions (FIs). The problem is more difficult in the post-recession era because...

Managing PTO in StaffPro

Managing scheduling and coverage for branch employee PTO (Personal Time Off) is a challenging and thankless task in financial institutions (FIs) with multiple branch locations. The StaffPro branch resource management system has several features that work together to facilitate and automate much of what is needed to manage PTO.

PTO Scheduling and Coverage

Scheduling employee time off is a complex and thankless task for financial institutions with multiple branch locations. This article discusses challenges and practices seen in the industry.

Branch Float Staff Managed Many Ways

All financial institutions (FIs) with a branch network have to deal with variability in scheduling staff. Much of it is to cover planned absences from vacation, PTO or training. This article is based on interviews about float staffing with seven institutions, plus Point Enterprises' experience implementing software to automate and manage scheduling.

Branch and Teller Float Management in StaffPro

Float staff scheduling and management for tellers, platform and universal employees are built into the StaffPro Branch Resource Management system. Its features are designed so that most of the work is performed automatically by StaffPro.

What is the Right Number of Tellers?

Financial institutions often ask what the right number of tellers is to staff a branch. The answer is that it depends on the branch and market. Identifying the unique characteristics of each branch in the context of its market is the trick.