Lender · Salt Lake City, UT · Member since 2012 · 714 posts · 169 votes
A smaller banking institution out of Wisconsin, Associated Bank, is closing some of its branch locations in order to fund the growing trend it sees in mobile banking. CFO, Christopher Del Moral-Niles says the bank has plans to close 1/3 of its branches, “If we close four branches,” Del Moral-Niles said, “assuming an annual spend of $2.5 million per branch — that’s now $10 million we can invest in mobile.”
Associated Bank began promoting its mobile banking app in 2012. The app allows banking customers to make deposits, handle payments between customers, text chat, etc. With more and more of the new generations of banking customers preferring to banking online, mobile seems to be a good investment for Associated Bank. But with this investment comes another investment, that is, in mobile security. With hackers always devising new tricks and techniques to defeat firewalls, banks that do go mobile in a big way will also face security challenges in a big way.
Sounds like they are having some challenges. One of the problems they are having is closing branches in rural areas. The CFO describes a number of branches in small towns where the nearest other branch is 20 or 30 miles away. “This branch may only see 5,000 or 6,000 transactions a month, compared to 20,000 or 30,000 in a city branch in Milwaukee. If we close that branch, how many customers do we keep? I would say we only retain 50% to 60% of them.”
Associated Bank did seem like one of the more antiquated banks regarding technology. Up until about a couple years ago, they were still using "coupon books" for paying their mortgages. They switched to paper statements. I should check again if they ever added the ability to pay the mortgage online, because they are one of only two where I have to write out a check each month (which is annoying). Everything else has an auto-pay feature.