Fifth Third Bancorp, which has ambitious plans for the Chicago market, is pushing for new commercial business to balance expansion on the retail side.
The Cincinnati regional said Monday that it would open a 25,000-square-foot retail lockbox facility in suburban Oak Lawn, Ill., that will be equipped to handle nearly 7.5 million payments per month.
The center, a mirror of the company's retail lockbox operation in Cincinnati, will serve current and future clients such as utilities, retail credit operations, financial services companies, and telecommunications, cable, satellite, and publishing firms, Fifth Third said.
The facility is to open in the first quarter, said Bradlee F. Stamper, the president and chief executive of Fifth Third Bank of Chicago, in an interview Monday. It will be in a former Old Kent Financial Corp. operations center; Fifth Third bought Old Kent last year.
The building was already laid out for bank operations, Mr. Stamper said, "so we could spend our energy on the equipment and the software."
Fifth Third said it plans to make as many as 150 hires over the next three years for the center, which will operate 24 hours, seven days a week.
Mr. Stamper discounted reports of the demise of the check as a payment mechanism, remarking that the experts have been predicting the death of branch banking throughout the 20 years he has been in the business.
"There's still an awful lot of checks out there, and an awful lot of customers come into branches," he said. "We feel very strongly that this investment is going to pay off very quickly."
Fifth Third also is moving aggressively in retail, pursuing a program to open 20 new branches in 20 months in the Chicago market, Mr. Stamper said.
The Chicago market is extremely fragmented, with the top three banks combined holding only about 30% market share, bankers have said. But in a market notable for its number of prospective merger partners - Illinois is home to nearly 800 b nks - "We're taking a fairly aggressive de novo stance," choosing to build new operations rather than buying existing ones, Mr. Stamper said.
Fifth Third already has a lockbox operation in Chicago serving the business-to-business market.
