Gerald Banmiller considers 1st Colonial National Bank in Collingswood, N.J., a "pristine little environment."
For Mr. Banmiller, that means the 3-year-old bank follows none of the trends that drive him, its president and chief executive, crazy.
There are a lot of them.
For starters, he despises the idea of tellers selling products. In his opinion - and the 56-year-old Mr. Banmiller admits he is old-fashioned - tellers have one job: counting money.
"That's what they're supposed to do," he said in an interview last week. "If the branch manager, the senior staff, and the marketing people are doing their jobs, tellers don't have to capture people" and make a pitch.
Mr. Banmiller takes an even dimmer view of supermarket-branch tellers who venture into the aisles to buttonhole shoppers. "In New Jersey you can't walk into a supermarket without a raptor bird trying to sell you product," he said.
Another irritant: business casual. Do not expect to see employees of his $125 million-asset bank in polo shirts and khakis on Fridays - or any other day. The dress code is strictly shirt and tie, all the time.
Then there is the issue of incentive pay. In Mr. Banmiller's opinion, nobody at a bank should get it except top-ranking officers, who he said are the only people who can directly influence its performance.
At 1st Colonial, only Mr. Banmiller and his top three deputies receive incentive-based pay. Everyone else gets a salary, even loan officers - or rather, especially loan officers.
"I don't believe in paying people to make loans," he said. "And I think if you gave regulators some sodium pentathol and asked them, they'd agree with me.
"If you incent lenders heavily, they don't focus on retention," Mr. Banmiller said. 'I've mentioned retention to some bankers and they look at me like I'm a Bolshevik."
Not surprisingly, his ideas provoke strong responses.
John Carusone, the president and CEO of the Bank Analysis Center investment bank and consulting firm in Hartford, Conn., said Mr. Banmiller risks "financial obsolescence" by clinging to an outmoded business model.
"The banking industry lost market share to the brokerage and insurance industries when it cloaked itself in a mantle of financial traditionalism," Mr. Carusone said. "The trick is to try to strike an appropriate balance, which the more effective bankers accomplish every day. It's unrealistic to turn back the clock."
Robert E. Kafafian, the president and CEO of Kafafian Group Inc., a bank performance consulting firm in Parsippany, N.J., called Mr. Banmiller's views extreme but said they have "a lot of merit."
Tellers have far more service than sales opportunities, Mr. Kafafian said, and focusing on sales could put service at risk. Also, he said, the industry is fraught with poorly designed incentive plans that often do more harm than good.
Still, Mr. Kafafian said he would never advise a bank to abandon cross-selling or incentive compensation. "In this day and age everyone has to be in a sales mode as well as a service mode," he said.
Though that sounds reasonable, it is unlikely to influence Mr. Banmiller. He doesn't think very highly of consultants either.
