Banking's most visible employees - its tellers - are giving the job a new image.
Once confined to relatively simple tasks, such as taking deposits and processing withdrawals, tellers are moving up to compiling customer profiles and participating in branch-based efforts to sell financial products.
The change reflects the industry's effort to make the money it spends on branch operations go further.
Cleveland-based KeyCorp, for one, is trying to move tellers "into value-added services and away from the transactions," said Scott Peters, senior vice president and national sales manager at the $66.3 billion-asset banking company. "They are stretching their career aspirations."
Tellers' skills are improving largely because banks have invested in intensive training to make them more sales-oriented, bankers said.
But the technology in branches has also evolved to a point where advanced abilities are necessary.
Indeed, bankers in charge of hiring tellers say they are looking for dramatically different skills.
"Sixteen years ago we were looking at math skills and a person's proficiency for balancing," said Candace H. Fitzek, executive vice president and director of retail services in Connecticut and Rhode Island for Bank of Boston Corp. "Now we are looking at their proficiency in using technology."
One reason bankers can be more selective about hiring is that the number of tellers required per office is dropping each year.
According to the American Bankers Association, there were 443,000 tellers at the end of 1995, 12% fewer than a decade earlier.
As the teller numbers wane, the proportion of electronic transactions rises. For instance, automated teller machine transactions increased 100% over the last 10 years, the ABA said. Tellers still handle most bank transactions - 56% last year, compared with 26% for ATMs. But ATM transactions are increasing faster. By 1998, the ABA projects, tellers will account for 41% of transactions, ATMs 31%.
The consulting firm Towers Perrin said only 60% of banking transactions in 1990 were made with the help of a teller. In 1980 that figure was 85%, and Towers Perrin projects that by 2000 only 10% of transactions will by handled by a teller.
Having the greatest impact on live-teller transactions are ATMs, customer-operated kiosks, personal computers, and phone services.
"There are large blocks of customers who don't want to even go into a branch, and they certainly don't want to see a teller," said David Partridge, a San Francisco-based partner of Towers Perrin. "The teller line doesn't get a whole lot of value for the bank."
To squeeze out more revenue, bankers have been slowly changing the teller's role.
Some banks don't even use the term "teller" anymore. Bank of Boston uses "service associate." BayBanks Inc., which is merging with Bank of Boston, uses "customer service representative."
"There's a lot of baggage with the word teller," said Mr. Peters at KeyCorp, where tellers are known as branch associates. "It makes people think about something that is antiquated and very transaction-oriented."
Many retail banking experts say the job will become even more profoundly different.
"Tellers need to be a source of business," said Bruce Wheeler, managing director at Omega Performance, a San Francisco-based consulting firm. "They are not just a cost to the bank. They are an important ingredient in revenue."
KeyCorp put a plan in motion, the Key Sales System, with that in mind. It is a sales training and mentoring program designed to reach all tellers in the 1,300 branch offices.
"The idea is to implement a holistic sales process where employees interact not just with customers but with each other," Mr. Peters said. "What is needed is a consistent needs-based approach to selling."
Banc One Corp. is making plans for a similar "branch team" approach to sales.
"We want the tellers to help explain to customers how to do many of the banking functions themselves," said Stephen Hughes, vice president and manager of retail transaction services of at the Columbus, Ohio, institution.
Classroom and on-the-job training hours have multiplied to support these efforts. The bank is reengineering its training programs to be uniform throughout the bank's multistate branch system.
Ms. Fitzek said the bulk of the training at Bank of Boston has centered on using computers and the automated systems installed behind the teller window.
"We do a lot more live training when there is downtime in the branch, and we see a lot more role-playing and mentoring," she said.
The training is also aimed at making tellers faster at transactions, so they have time to profile customers and make referrals without causing delays in the teller line.
"Customers still want that speed," said Banc One's Mr. Hughes.
Banc One also wants tellers to venture out into the branch lobbies, directing traffic and setting up appointments for customers with platform staff, said Mr. Hughes.
Other banks have taken this idea a step further by cross-training tellers to perform basic platform functions, like opening accounts. Bank of Boston calls them "swing employees," because they can fill in where necessary during peak demand.
The additional training has attracted employees with more skills and education - people with ambitions beyond the teller line - Ms. Fitzek noted.
"We are seeing interest from college graduates who want to use the position to leapfrog into management training positions."
Teller compensation is changing to reflect their expanding role. The average salary of a head teller was $19,300 last year, according to a survey of more than 700 banks by the Bank Administration Institute. Incentives brought total compensation to $20,600.
Salaries of more-junior tellers ranged from $14,000 to $16,000. Their total compensation ranged from $14,800 to $17,300.
But those numbers were for full-time employees, and in recent years the trend has been toward part-time and peak-time-only tellers. Banks use them to "modulate their staffs better to meet demand more efficiently," said Mr. Partridge from Towers Perrin.
The base salary for part-timers averaged $15,100 last year, the BAI survey showed. Their overall compensation, including bonus and incentives, averaged $19,600.
Head tellers' base salaries rose 17.6% from 1989 to 1995, and pay including incentives rose 17.2%. For lower-ranking full-timers, the base- pay increases were 18.8%, the total 21.4%. The base pay of part-timers rose faster, by 21.7%, but their total including incentives increased only 16.2%.
The size of the incentive component reflects fundamental changes in the teller profession. They are getting fees for referrals to specialized personnel like brokers or loan officers.
Bankers are looking for additional ways to use incentives in team sales approaches. Bank of Boston, for example, awards them quarterly for referrals to other bank employees, said Ms. Fitzek.
Some observers said banks could do more to encourage tellers in these sales efforts. "Branch sales managers need to include tellers in their sales meetings," said Mr. Wheeler from Omega Performance. "There isn't enough of this right now to sustain those sales efforts in most banks."
The number of tellers will keep on declining, bankers said, but few are willing to abandon the concept altogether.
"There will be fewer, certainly," said Mr. Hughes. "But they have a way to go before I would call them dinosaurs."
