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Isn’t it funny that as more and more transactions these days are made online, traditional brick-and-mortar operations are beginning to discover the power of leading edge retail environment design?
The banking industry is a case in point. For as long as I can remember, going to the bank has always been a painfully boring sensory experience, not to mention a thankless chore. Mercifully, online banking has made that chore all but obsolete. No more waiting in line. No more sensory deprivation. And lots more valuable information at a glance.
And thanks to the increasing number of mobile apps, you can bank anywhere, anytime. According to Global Industry Analysis (GIA), the customer base for m-banking will reach 1.1 billion by the year 2015. Though that growth is being driven by banks in developing countries (particularly in Asia) to bank the ‘unbanked’, the convenience of m-banking will most certainly drive similar behaviour in developed countries, despite the presence of brick-and-mortar retail branches on every street corner.
Given these circumstances, what do you do with all that expensive retail space? BNP Paribas (pictured above) recently unveiled its answer to this question. Created by Paris-based architect Fabrice Ausset of Zoevox, these haute couture digs offer up an exhibition space for children, a café, and lots of eye candy by designers such as Christophe Delcourt, India Mahdavi, Pierre Paulin, Philippe Starck and Karim Rashid. Oh, and you can bank there too.
In similar fashion, Raiffeisenbank (above) has recently overhauled its Zurich flagship, which looks like the result of a chance meeting between the space station in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey and a pair of jian zhi scissors (traditional tool used to create Chinese paper cut art).
Joining its European counterparts, although with considerably less design flair, ING Direct Canada just opened to the public its ‘Network Orange’ café on Yonge Street in downtown Toronto. Set within the framework of a heritage building, the interior is a nod to the iconic post-industrial loft aesthetic, designed to invite conversation, inspire creativity and encourage collaboration.
Now that virtual banking has relieved brick-and-mortar branches of their traditional functionality, these brands are looking for ways to engage customers with experiential environments that are free of the boring banking chores of yore. And you can bet that as m-banking takes over, we’ll see a lot more real estate unloaded to reduce operating costs.
In any case, the only people lining up at the bank nowadays are octogenarians. No one else has the time or the patience. So if you’re opening a bank branch for the rest of us, you better have something like one of the above in mind. wn
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