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?

Feb 7, 2023

Next-Gen Scheduling For Branch Staff

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

March 11, 2022

How Much Branch Time Is Wasted?

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

March 6, 2020

Teller Performance Measurement

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

August 13, 2019

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.

June 5th, 2019

3 Ideas To Reduce Branch Overhead

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

April 23rd, 2019

Forecasting: Science And Art

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

July 18th, 2018

What's New in StaffPro Version 5.4

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

June 25th, 2018

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.

October 19th, 2017

Opportunities for Process Automation

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

August 1st, 2017

Float Staff - Not Just Tellers Anymore

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

May 16th, 2017

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?

November 9th, 2016

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.

September 13th, 2016

The Objective Is Service

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

May 31st, 2016

Automating Exception Handling

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

April 14th, 2016

Challenges of Universal Branch Staffing

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

October 28th, 2015

Branch Performance Measurement

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

August 28th, 2015

StaffPro cash automation metrics

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

July 30th, 2015

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?

July 28th, 2015

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.

April 24th, 2015

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…

March 3rd, 2015

Automating Image System Indexing

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

October 6, 2014

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 . . . .

May 29, 2014

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. . . .

April 22, 2014

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...

March 5, 2014

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 . . .

February 21, 2014

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...

January 31, 2014

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...

December 23, 2013

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.

November 29, 2013

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.

November 26, 2013

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.

November 11, 2013

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.

October 29, 2013

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.

October 21, 2013