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EMPLOYMENT, SKILLS AND EDUCATION

IN U.S. BANKING

Francicso Bosch – Guadanalítica S.A.Ernesto Bergeron – Cohen Brown Management Group Inc.

Jorge López – Universidad Carlos III Madrid

Madrid, December 2000

EMPLOYMENT, SKILLS AND EDUCATION IN U.S. BANKING

1. - Introduction

This document analyses how the changes in supply and demand for bank services in the USA have led to changes in the characteristics of the staff hired, against the background of an educational system gradually offering greater and greater qualification. First, it looks at the environment of banking – technical change and legal regulation – considered as part of the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate sector. Next it describes how the changes in the banking services market produce a modification in the derived demand for staff (or their skills); and finally it examines what is happening to the educational characteristics of the staff hired, both of those being hired now and future prospects.

In recent decades American banks have hired a growing percentage of graduates, and everything indicates that this trend will presumably continue in the coming years. The increase in the percentage of graduates is attributed both to the fact that:

banks “need” more and more qualified people; the greater complexity of banking activity leads to a greater demand for economic and financial expertise and types of behaviour in which social skills occupy a more important place; and

the growing supply of graduates, who are relatively cheap, start off with broad “general”-type training, and show good potential for a career in banking.

In this study it is argued that banking has become a “buyers’ market” – buyers who are becoming gradually more informed. For this reason it is necessary to sell to the customer, and it is no longer enough to provide them with multiple products and services. What is more, the practice of cross selling is undoubtedly clumsy in dealing with the demands of a customer base (of an increasingly higher average educational attainment) aware of the complexity of what is offered by the financial market, not just the banking market. There are many different product and channel options and while it is efficient to integrate buying and usage decisions (what, when and how), it is not easy and it requires time to develop this competence and keep it up to date.

The banking professional has the challenge of acting with the social and communicational skills typical of relationship banking, while at the same time upholding the habit of a job well done, typical of the traditional bureaucratic tradition of banking. And this is because both components are basic – along with greater financial expertise.

This is a challenge that usually meets with only modest success because it is usual to underestimate the difficulty of financial consolidation implicit in cross selling: being the only supplier of a customer who has difficulty in understanding and deciding on which products and services to buy and on the interrelated decisions on their use (how, when and through which channels).

The supply of the educational system has an influence on hiring policies beyond the extent that seems necessary from either the changes in banking jobs or the skills (or shortcomings) of the graduates. Banks have traditionally trained their own staff, in both general-type skills and typically banking skills, including behaviour patterns – predominantly bureaucratic until recently.

Post-secondary students now come to the labour market with general knowledge (e.g. accounting and financial). However, the educational system does not usually equip students with the social and communicational skills demanded by, among other activities, banking. Our exposé suggests that the

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educational system meets the demands for cognitive skills but not for social and communicational skills.

Perhaps it is possible to speak of a degree of “overqualification” in knowledge and “underqualification” in relationship behaviour or social skills among the graduates hired by banks, in the light of what is required nowadays in the jobs that have changed most, those involving relationships with customers. There are not enough data to assess whether banks hire too many graduates, in the sense that this policy involves an unnecessary additional cost and a negative repercussion on professional careers. Although the reality of the banking market also suggests that this hiring policy may be economically correct when the analysis is broadened to take account of: the selection policies and criteria for general management and human resources; sociological considerations relating to:

the growing supply of graduates the preferences of a customer base with growing educational attainment.

This study is about U.S. banking. However, in practice, it touches on two different spheres: banking in the broad sense, including banks, savings institutions and specialist financial

institutions (from mortgage institutions to brokers) banking as part of the overall framework of similar activities (often notably substitutable)

labelled Finance, Insurance and Real Estate.

The description also focuses to a large extent on the case of consumer banking in a broad sense, from the mass market to private banking. This simplifies the description, without leaving aside important features. For example, when it is necessary to point out important differences, we speak of the credit activities of corporate banks.

The description centres on changes that have gained in importance from the 1970s onwards; although there are references to earlier dates with regard to both innovations and banking regulation. The future is seen as a continuation of the realities that have already become important; although e-banking is taken as an example of what is – or is not – another revolution in banking activity and its effects on the derived demand for staff.

The documentary sources used have been supplemented with interviews and qualitative information gathered by the authors over more than two decades of banking experience.

2. – Technical Change, Regulation and the Transformation of Banking

U.S. banking has undergone a profound transformation, the first signs of which are to be found in the 1950s, but which continued over the following years. Without exaggeration, over the last forty years the banking market has done much more then simply getting rid of the century-old regulatory straitjacket that was affecting its development and worsened with the legislation introduced after the financial crisis beginning with the Crash of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929.

Exogenous technical change – IT and telecommunications – has played a crucial role in the banking revolution of the last half-century. Specifically, it would be impossible to explain the following innovations without it:

1. - the renewal of many – and the new – products and services; e.g. the use of cash cards, or “multi-product” accounts (bringing together payments, and asset and liability products);

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2. - the change in the way services are offered and used, leaving behind the traditional bank image, operating in real time and using paper as an optional medium; and the appearance of self-service (e.g. through cash dispensers and Internet);

3. - the role of branches in reducing their function of service-dispensers and increasing their commercial function of customer aid; the appearance of new channels, such as the telephone, point of sale terminals (EFTPOS) and Internet, enabling operations distant from offices and outside office hours.

4. - the changes in bank operations, which have progressed from providing clumsy accounting information to managing assets and liabilities with daily updated information, and powerful risk forecasting and management (not just credit risk); management that now treats the customer as the business unit, without sacrificing management by product.

After the long parenthesis represented by the depression of the 1930s, the growth of the U.S. economy led to an increase in financial assets and a greater demand for receipt and payment services. Banks were the main providers of such services, although with important limitations, especially when compared to the regulations affecting most European banking systems.

Two of these restrictions are especially revealing: in the 20th century it became a general rule that banks could not grow outside the state in which

they were based; this prevented interstate branching; the Banking Act of 1933 consolidated the complete separation of investment banks from

commercial banks; the latter had to restrict themselves to lending and were not allowed to participate in underwriting. That is to say, it closed the door on the development of universal banks similar to those in the majority of continental European countries.

It was precisely this atomised banking system, forced into geographical and risk (through sectoral) concentration, that faced the challenge of the sixties, in which the process of commercial innovations began that revolutionised the U.S. banking scene. A revolution that ended with a period in which banking services were practically those offered by banks and similar institutions – savings and loans and credit unions.

The growing diversification of products and services and disintermediation led to an increase in non-banking competitors. So-called globalisation also made its effects felt in the banking services market. Strictly speaking, it was a move from a regulated supply of banking services to a supply from many competitors (neither exclusively banks nor financial institutions) to cater for customers’ financial demands. For this reason it is advisable to look at the market in terms of at least three types of competitors, grouped together under the statistical heading of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate.

The range of products described above did not lead to the definitive financial consolidation of customers’ services, even though there were institutions that catered for all customer demands. This unexploited, or unsuccessfully tackled, opportunity is the key to everything that followed. It was a situation, however, that eroded the banks’ possibilities of competing, since certain spheres of the business were forbidden to them while their competitors were allowed to enter their traditional feud.

By the 1980s it had become important and urgent to address the straitjacket regulating banking and preventing banks from taking on a progressively more competitive market: “More and more, U.S. bank regulators were faced with choice between regulating less and having less to regulate” (Calomiris, 2000, p. XIV).

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Finally, in 1999, the legislators gave those banks that wanted it the freedom to behave as universal banks: commercial banks can now act as financial intermediaries in the broadest sense. This is one more reason for treating finance, insurance and real estate as one whole: they are activities whose interrelationships and complementary aspects result in significant substitutability between competitors (above all) specializing in one of the three spheres mentioned, in that they offer products that cater to similar demands or are substitutes, when not complementary.

Typically, a client – either an individual or a legal entity – has a range of transferable and real estate assets and usually takes into account yields, risks and operating costs. For this reason, maintaining forced specialisation on the supply side was inefficient and harmful to the competitors thus affected; and, as a result, it was not beneficial to customers either.

These are the considerations that lead us to treat banking as a subsector of a much broader market that we suggest should be bound within the limits of what is statistically grouped together under the terms of finance, insurance and real estate. This reflection is also applicable to employment in banks and to the role played by the supply of the educational system.

At the same time, unless the contrary is indicated, and in order to make our exposé more efficient, the term banking will be understood as referring to the whole group of deposit and credit (or mixed deposit and credit) institutions that make up corporate and commercial banks, savings institutions and credit unions. The story of the past forty years, and also of the foreseeable future, revolves around the events in the business of banks attending to individuals – from the mass market to private or trust banking.

The small world of consumer banking is sufficient to appropriate to illustrate the changes to be taken into account in the analysis of employment in banking and its relation to education. This is supplemented with specific references to cases that deserve a different treatment, as is the case of corporate lending management.

In accordance with these guidelines, we will look at the evolution of banking activity as part of the sector of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. The chosen data illustrate:

the growth of the supply of banking services, within the general growth of the sector; the growth of employment, with the profound transformation represented by the increase in

management, specialist and sales staff and the reduction of over 10% in administrative and support staff in less than a decade.

The number of banks, savings institutions and credit unions has fallen since the 1960s and, even more rapidly, in the 1990s. At the end of the first half of 2000 there were 10,101 banks, 59% fewer than at the end of 1986, and 1,624 savings institutions, 44.2% fewer than in 1986 (see Fig. 1). These data contrast with the number of branches, that has grown 3.2% overall: although bank branches have grown by 23,3%, the number of savings institutions branches has fallen by 56.4% (see Fig. 2). That is to say, the supply of banking services has increased through branch networks, although the number of competitors has decreased – due to mergers and acquisitions, among institutions of the same or of different states.

According to the Current Population Survey (CPS), employment in Finance, Insurance and Real Estate grew from 6.5 million people in 1983 to 8.8 million in 1999: that is, 6.6% of the total working population (see Table 1). This increase in employment, at 35%, is higher than the 27.1% growth of the working population of the USA as a whole between 1983 and 1999.

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In greater detail, the increase in employment in Finance, Insurance and Real Estate between 1990 and 1996 shows a net growth, after a fall between 1990 and 1992. The breakdown of employment within the sector over these seven years hardly varied: it fell in Depository Institutions by one percent, to 28% of jobs in the sector; it rose by one per cent in Insurance Carriers, plus Insurance Agents, Brokers and Services, which accounted for 31% of jobs in 1986; while Non-Depository Institutions, Security and Commodity Brokers plus Holding and Other Investment Offices accounted for 20% of jobs, with an increase of 3 per cent (see Fig. 3).

In banking, in 1998, commercial banks accounted for 71.5% of employment, savings institutions for 12.9%, credit unions for 8.8%, and others (banking and closely related functions, n.e.c.), for 6.7%.

With regard to occupation, there has been a profound transformation in the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate sector. The CPS figures show that between 1993 and 1999:

managerial and professional specialist occupations increased from 24.7% to 34.5%; sales occupations increased from 23.2% to 33.8%; and technical, administrative, support and others fell from 52.1% to 40.3% (see Fig. 4).

The figures available from the American Bankers Association for the different occupations in banking in 1998 show a different breakdown from those published in the CPS. However, its estimate of the growth of employment in banking between 1998 and 2008 forecasts: an increase in employment in banking of 2.8%; a drop in administrative posts of 3.1%, a mixture of

important reductions in:* 28.5% in general office clerks* 28.3% in duplicating, mail and other office machine operators, and* 6.4% in cashiers;

in contrast with high growth in:* 17.9% in office and administrative support supervisors and managers and* 13.9% in new account clerks, banking; and

an increase of 10.6% in executive, administrative and managerial posts (see Table 2).

These estimates use categories that are not easy to interpret. In the light of our following exposé, it is surprising that employment in marketing and sales is estimated to rise by only 45.4% from a current total of 38,000 persons, unless – as is assumed in this study – only “staff” support personnel are included in this category, while “line” sales personnel are included in categories such as “new account clerks, banking”. It is these considerations that lead us to infer that in the future there will be an increase in jobs in which workers exercise a certain degree of discretion in their work and a reduction in the jobs typical of banks that used to process information in a more or less routine way.

The above description of trends in banking employment are confirmed by the data on Finance, Insurance and Real Estate over the past decade: it can observed that the sector is expanding and changing from a predominantly bureaucratic structure to an occupational structure in which discretion-type skills, such as decision making or sales, are more and more important.

This outlook of sector growth and occupational transformation, as a result of the opportunities arising out of exogenous technical change, deregulation, economic growth and commercial innovation, provides a succinct illustration of the extraordinary evolution of banking seen as part of, and in

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competition with, the overall group of institutions that comprise the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate sector.

A century ago, Alfred Marshall described the reality of the market through the analogy of scissors: two blades, supply and demand – this is the perspective we adopt in this analysis. We shall now go on to talk about how the supply of banking services has changed in the past forty years.

3. – Diversification and Discrimination in the Supply of Banking Services

In the second half of the 20th century, the supply of banking services was expanded as regards both asset and liability products and payment systems. Innovation often originated in non-banking organizations, as was the case of Diners Card in 1956.

However, it was during the 1960s that companies and banks began to learn how to cope in a financial services market: competition, in products and prices, gradually emerged to the detriment of regulations that had been designed to achieve (and had achieved) a standardised market for all by reducing competition and banks’ autonomy to manage their business to a minimum, for the sake of a “solid, solvent” banking sector.

However, from the 1960s, they began to make the most of loopholes left by the regulations – the Banking Act or Glass Steagall Act of 1933, Regulation Q on maximum interest rates for deposits and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation – to innovate in asset and liability products and get around the straitjacket imposed on interest rates.

It is impossible to overestimate the effect innovation in asset and liability products had on the management of banks’ balances and their ability to compete. As well as this extraordinary transformation, it was also the appearance of non-banking competitors that encouraged this diversification of asset and liability products, many of which led to the disintermediation of funds managed by banks.

The transformation of the supply of products is revealing of the scope of the change, but also indicates that it was the products that occupied centre-stage. That is to say, product banking still existed, but it was now possible to glimpse the – as yet unresolved – challenge of customer relationship-centred banking. It can be said that the latter, in fact, started out with what began to be called “cash management”.

At this point it will be very useful to cite word for word some paragraphs from The Ongoing Revolution in American Banking, by Arthur F. Burns:

“In the later 1950s somewhat more than half of the assets of commercial banks consisted of loans: consumer credit, residential mortgages, and –most important- business loans, particularly short-term loans. Their remaining assets consisted mainly of federal government securities but also of some securities of state and local governments. The total volume of assets any bank could acquire depended on the volume of deposits it could attract locally. Banks could, however, meet rising loan demands by selling off some of their holdings of Treasury securities. The composition of bank assets thus varied over the business cycle, with loans rising and investments falling during business expansions and the reverse occurring during recessions (Burns, 2000, p. 6-7)

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…………… ………………………. …………. ……………..

Learning by Banks and Business

A quarter of a century ago, in the early 1960s, the larger, more credit-worthy corporations were beginning to learn that they often could meet their short-term credit needs more cheaply by selling commercial paper to other companies, to pension funds, and to other organizations with temporarily idle cash rather than by borrowing from banks. To be sure the assistance of banks was still needed; in order to get a high credit rating, commercial paper ordinarily had to be backed by a bank line of credit –but this assistance was forthcoming. Also, particularly after interest rates began their extended rise, many businesses discovered the merits of “cash management”. Instead of letting their deposit balances at banks rise and with variations of their receipts and payments, they undertook to keep cash at the minimum required for efficient operations and to invest temporary surpluses in interest-earning money market instruments.

For their part, banks made the monumental discovery that their outstanding loans and investments need not be constrained to whatever volume of deposits happened to come their way. Rather, they could attract the funds they wished by issuing negotiable certificates of deposit (CDs) at competitive interest rates, provided the rates offered did not exceed the prevailing Reg. Q ceilings. Banks also learned to stretch their available resources by borrowing “federal funds” from one another; these consisted of deposits that banks held at Federal Reserve banks as well as deposits of other financial entities that were accorded this privilege.

These and other fund-raising devices, which came to be known as “liability management” by banks, had far-reaching consequences………..In the new era banks were free to “buy” lendable funds in the market; they lost no time in doing so and in aggressively searching out profitable ways to employ their funds at home and abroad.” (Burns, 2000, p.12-13).

“Commercial Banks have become subject to increasing competition from investment banks and other financial institutions as a result of the growth of “securitization” –a process that consists of the substitution of marketable securities for the traditional bank loan, either when the borrowing is first arranged or at a later point.…..................... ...............................................“A different form of securitization [also emerged], involving the sale of interest in a package of loans originated by a bank, thrift institution, or other organization. This practice began in 1970…” (Burns, 2000, p. 17-18)

As well as these changes, Regulation Q began to be relaxed in 1973 when the ceilings for short-term CDs were abolished. In short, the supply of banking products and services had been diversified and the interest rate again became important in savers’ and investors’ decision making. The inflation that became a cause of concern to savers and investors heightened the market’s sensitivity to interest rates. And it is not surprising that, against this background, innovations emerged in the 1980s that would finally convince the authorities of the advisability of:

freeing interest rates, and abolishing the restrictions suffered by banks in a “borderless” market, in that

competitors had emerged both inside and outside the country.

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The appearance of Money Market Funds in the 1970s is another milestone in the same direction. On the demand side, a growing concern with interest rates, as a result of inflation, coincided with the predominance, in individuals’ assets, of financial assets (64% in 1982). On the supply side, investment banks realized that, like mutual funds, or investment funds, for long-term securities, it was possible to design a formula for short-term securities that were called money market funds (money funds) and could be sold in relatively small stakes. In this way they could be offered to individuals and compete favourably with deposits (Ballarín, 1989, p. 24).

Before continuing, it is a good idea to point out that the subtitle in the citation from Burns’ book could well be extended to “Learning by Banks, Business and Consumers”, for three different reasons:

1) the educational attainment of individuals, on average, increased during the period under study;

2) the ever more competitive operation of the market and, in particular, the growing variety of prices and conditions, encouraged (gave an incentive to) the so-called “financial literacy” of customers;

3) companies were managed by people who, independently or as part of the company, were personal customers demanding financial services.

The above, however, needs to be qualified. The transformation is often overestimated in the following way: as customers had more and more options and knew more and more about finance, they took more and more decisions on their own behalf. In this sense the importance of selling to customers was also heightened, not only because they were no longer “captive clients in a uniform market for all”, but because they were customers with their own criteria and multiple sources of information.

The overestimation occurs because an increase in the number of options (more competition) does not necessarily lead to a greater willingness to take independent decisions. Perhaps it is more realistic to think the opposite. Why? Because customers, in general, do not derive any special pleasure from managing their financial affairs and, what is more, it takes them time to gather information and form a criterion in such a complex field as finances. It may be true that that there is a lot of financial self-medication. But this is what an individual resorts to when he does not have confidence in his financial doctors, especially to entrust them with “the whole of his health”, as we shall argue later.

The importance of this innovation is illustrated by the cash management account (CMA) introduced by Merrill Lynch in 1977. This product caused controversy but was extremely successful, as was confirmed by both the customers that opened one and the competitors that brought out similar products, as was the case of Citibank, with its Focus account.

The CMA combined, for the first time, all the basic functions of banking in one single product, which can be summarised as:

management of term assets a means of making payments (a current account) management of liquid assets financing through the associated credit card.

It is this potential capacity of integrating the services offered to the customer that undoubtedly makes the CMA the most revolutionary innovation in banking for many decades. It contains the essentials of “relationship banking”, since it makes it technically possible to move from product management to customer (and product) management.

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However, this account is on “the cutting edge of a receipt and payment systems technology” that at that time (and even now in the USA) did not provide an electronic receipt and payment system for all financial transactions or bills. This is a limitation whose importance will be analysed later. The CMA is also a good indication of how technical and commercial innovation was, in its turn, constrained by prevailing regulations.

The CMA is also an indication of the fact that it takes years – and a series of changes in the environment and in the behaviour of competitors and customers – to transform markets. The following is a citation from E. Ballarín in Estrategias Competitivas para la Banca, which describes the innovation represented by the CMA from an appropriate perspective, with rigour and in detail:

“The abolition of the system of fixed fees in May 1975 caused a shock in the sector and led to innovative actions. The most important was the introduction, in 1977, of what is considered the most controversial financial product of the last ten years: the “Cash Management Account” (CMA). The success of the idea was astonishing, partly confirmed by the large number of imitations that continue to proliferate. Today, Merrill Lynch has over a million CMAs, with an aggregate balance of more than 70,000 million dollars...”................. ............................... ..........................The Cash Management Account is a hybrid product that combines the advantages of:

1) A securities account on which credit can be requested (margin account), up to a maximum of 50% of the value of the securities deposited;

2) a money fund enabling excess liquidity to be put to profitable use;3) a VISA cash card; and4) a current account, with access to a credit card to facilitate greater liquidity.

................. ............................... ..........................To open a CMA requires a minimum of 20,000 dollars, which may be provided in the form of securities. In accordance with U.S. regulations, the accountholder may obtain a loan of up to 50% of the value of the securities. The excess balances of the account at any given moment, arising from sales of securities, dividends, interest on bonds or cash contributions, are automatically invested in a money fund at the beginning of each week. The current account services are provided by Banc One of Columbus (Ohio), which also processes the VISA card transactions. The customer can make payments by using the card or by writing cheques. For this, they have available the cash of the margin account that is waiting to be invested in the money fund, plus the net value of the investment made in this fund, plus the available portion of the credit line linked to the securities portfolio. Merrill Lynch receives daily reports, prepared by Banc One of Columbus, on the customer’s purchases................................ ......................................

...the account combines, to all effects and purposes, the advantages of a current account with the liquidity and yield of a money fund. What is more, including a securities account goes one step further towards providing a “centralised assets account” and satisfying one of the desires of individuals with medium and high wealth. It is not surprising that it should enjoy such a favourable welcome” (Ballarín, 1985, p. 111-113).

We should mention three other novel items in this process of innovation:1) in 1982 commercial banks were authorised to offer competitive products – Money

Market Deposit Accounts – with free interest rates, a minimum average balance of 2,500 dollars, a maximum of six cheques a month, but with no limit on withdrawal of funds in person;

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2) since January 1983 commercial banks and savings institutions have been able to offer an account – called “Super NOW”, similar to the money fund and with no limitation on cheques written;

3) finally it should be said that in 1986 the last restrictions on the freedom of interest rates introduced with Regulation Q were lifted.

All of the above illustrates how far diversification and disintermediation have changed the banking services market. More important examples could be mentioned, including Home Equity Loans, enabling banks to provide greater credit (against a real estate guarantee), or, if they so wish, it enables the individual to get extra benefit from their fixed real estate assets, since it offers a “credit policy” at a more advantageous price than traditional personal consumer loans.

We should, however, add an additional consideration on the transformation of financial – not just banking – services to companies, since they illustrate the importance of disintermediation and also show how “cash management” is of interest to everyone – companies, individuals and banks. Thus, among companies the expression “cash management”, according to Ballarín, describes: “...a set of services that some commercial banks offer to companies to speed up receipts, delay payments and control the different cash in hand and at banks accounts, in order to obtain the best possible yield from the funds invested in them” (Ballarín, 1985, p. 149).

Diversification and disintermediation have radically changed the outlook: both demand and supply have been transformed. Next we shall see how these occurrences have opened up for customers unsuspected horizons as a result of “comprehensive management of their financial product and service demands”, a kind of idyllic state in which the customer is totally satisfied with the financial services they enjoy... However, it seems that as well as the new technical and commercial supports, important behavioural changes among employees are also still needed, as well as substantial changes in customer preferences and behaviour.

4. – From the Demand for Banking Services to Relationship Banking

With formulas such as those offered by the “Super Now Accounts”, customers can manage their financial demands in a more integrated way. That is to say, they can make the most of the complementary nature of the products and services to obtain greater benefit from them: higher yield, less risk and, even, fewer fees and other management costs (including time required, which is becoming more and more important).

This is an opportunity banks seen ready to make the most of with so-called cross selling: selling to each customer all the asset, liability and means of payment products they need. This is a profitable approach for the bank, and advantageous for the customer, as we have just seen.

However, reality does not confirm these expectations. Instead of opting for “financial consolidation”, individuals prefer a growing number of financial providers, which, on average, increased from 2.7 to 3.2 between 1992 and 1998 (see Fig. 5). This behaviour contrasts with the increase in the number of people who said they preferred financial consolidation between 1987 and 2000 (see Fig. 6). However, it is always necessary to be prudent when comparing preferences with behaviour.

Faced with the contrast between what is analytically revealed as financially efficient for the customer and their behaviour, we must ask ourselves what has gone wrong in cross selling. The report MIXED

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MESSAGES. Consumers’ views on Financial Consolidation (Council on Financial Competition) speaks of “The Promise and the Paradox of Consolidation”.

The above data on individuals’ preferences and behaviour should be supplemented by the information that cross selling is efficient:

compared to gaining a new customer because it increases earnings with an increase in a customer’s balances management cost is reduced as a percentage of resources managed and customers with only one

provider switch institutions less often, which, overall, increases the value of the long-term customer (see Figs. 7 and 8).

However, it is banks that have the greatest potential for the financial consolidation of customers. The starting point is good, in that although banks achieve financial consolidation for only a small percentage of their customers, they have a high penetration in a wide range of products (see Fig. 9). This impression on banks is confirmed by their having the lowest rejection rate as potential “financial consolidator” (see Fig. 10), and is strengthened when it is observed that it is banks that have the highest share-of-wallet potential (see Fig. 11).

The empirical evidence is consistent with what has been expressed analytically. But what are customers’ arguments for not opting for financial consolidation? Three types of disadvantages:

1. greater risk (of fraud, etc.)2. unfavourable prices (banks abuse their dominant position over the customer)3. the provider does not have all suitable capacities (quality and number?) (see Fig. 12).

From the above we can infer that a large proportion of customers are favourable disposed to financial consolidation, but providers – banks to a lesser extent – are just not up to it. This situation is simply the banks’ Achilles heel. Especially when we remember that it was back in 1776 that Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, who made it clear that the specialisation that brings about the division of labour benefits everyone. This is why “financial doctors” make sense and why “financial self-medication is unwise.

Therefore we should ask what is behind the allusions to greater risks, unfavourable prices and incompetence. Below we refer to two groups of factors that are, to a great extent, behind the complaints of the customers who oppose financial consolidation. They are factors related to:

technology and the use of information, and the management of the customer-bank relationship.

In the 1970s Citibank emphasised the importance of information technology in banking management, both to reduce transformation costs and for a suitable, efficient multi-channel distribution (Ballarín, 1989, p. 72). As a consequence, banks made large investments in information systems and continue to do so today: they have generated marketing information systems, client information systems, they have developed data mining, etc. In short, they have provided the resources for obtaining detailed – and up-to-date – information on the customer and the products that they use or that it is thought they should demand.

At the same time, service was infused with new formats. Greater emphasis was placed on personalisation and sales, while transactional banking and the management of, for example, loan-related banking operations were automated or mechanised. The figure of the customer manager came to the fore – relationship account manager is one of the names used for this new occupational figure.

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Segmentation of the customer base combined information and analysis with customer profiles that make possible a service adapted to the choice between price (yield and risk) and service that provides formulae ranging from the highly personalised treatment of private banking to an extremely standardised service, supplemented with self-service. The customer relationship managers (CRMs) of First Union and their modern tools are one example of what banks are doing:

“In addition to relying on its people to further First Union’s customer relationship management goals, the institution has several technologies that CRMs and other line employees use when working with customers.

The main tool for the financial center employees is the SOLD (Sales Opportunity and Lead Development) system. This main-frame-based inhouse-developed system allows financial centers to look up a customer’s full relationship with First Union, including deposits, loans, and any other products or services he may use. The system also helps employees determine what the customer’s next need may be. And, SOLD is a sales management tool, keeping track of sales referrals and appointments” (Valentine, 1999, p. 64).

Banks, in short, have made a great effort to be able to offer the customer, in an integrated way, their different (but interdependent) financial demands. But not even this great effort has resulted in the success of cross selling, which is none other than financial consolidation.

Perhaps we should go one step further in our analysis of the – explicit and implicit – financial demands of customers. Market innovations and changes in this period have, strictly speaking, focused on management of the customer’s assets – share of wallet – with an inevitable reference to means of payment, simply because they cannot be ignored. However, the emphasis has been on keeping costs to a minimum, without perceiving the importance – in practice – of their key role in the customer’s financial life.

Means of payment are associated with cheques, cards, transfers and similar instruments. They are usually looked on as “the services” offered by banks together with their asset and liability products: a fund-centred rather than a flow-centred view of financial services. This is a view very typical of a banking system like the nineteenth-century one, in which receipts and payments were not comparatively very important, if only because financial flows, except in cash, did not have the same importance as today, in a much more financial economy.

From this perspective, cross selling suffers from what could be called flow short-sightedness: it does not see that beyond means of payments there exist receipt and payment flows that are just as important as the funds managed. What is more, there is no good asset and liability management that does not start out from the management of fund flows over time. This view is a consequence of understanding the customer as an economic unit, who has a life cycle with a sequence of receipts and payments – periodic and non-periodic receipt and payment flows – that are only partly the result of their wealth situation.

This interpretation suggests the great importance of the receipt and payment system of an economy. In this sense we should apply the words of Arthur F. Burns to all receipts and payments:

“Thus, the Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) which was activated in 1970 to facilitate the rapid international transfer of funds, has proved to be critically important to the development of the Eurodollar market. Similarly, transactions in U.S. government securities………..monetary payments have been enormously speeded by the use of electronic transfers rather than the sending of paper through the mails” (Burns, 1988, p. 83).

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In this sense, it is not enough to point out the enormous inefficiency of a paper-based payment system such as the U.S. one, where cheques, by value, accounted for 49% of payments in 1998, compared to 26% through cards and 19% in cash (see Fig. 13). Processing costs are enormously higher than in an electronic receipts and payment system, in which cheques are used less, and electronic booking is the only handling they are subjected to.

But this improvement is not enough, even in an economy like the Spanish one, which operates with a standardised receipt and payment system, electronically processed and with document truncation, and shows a key component for financial consolidation: the customer has a main current account which is, precisely the one that manages most (if not all) of the receipts and payments – periodic and non-periodic, in cash or through other means of payment, inside and outside the branch, whatever the distribution channel.

It is through the main account that the receipts and payments associated with the customer’s financial assets and liabilities usually pass, including those related to life and general insurance. For this reason, financial consolidation (cross selling) is more realistic in these circumstances. Even the concentration of information can become a favourable argument from the point of view of the customer, who may think: the bank knows my position and my future prospects and can advise me better than if it has only partial information.

This is precisely what is reflected in Figure 14: the advantages of concentrating information that can lead to greater benefits for the customer, although not necessarily the best prices in all products. This is because the bank can make use of the records it has on the customer’s financial activities (their receipts and payments over time). For this reason the Current Account is placed in the centre of the diagram and from it are projected the flows and its relationships to other products and services.

However, this view is not seen as being very important in the opportunities identified in the report MIXED MESSAGES. Consumers’ Views on Financial Consolidation. It suggests a choice that does not seem particularly convincing: a bank can position itself as a product purveyor or as an objective advisor. Both of these polar positions are unrealistic, as we have seen in the attempts made in the British market. Moreover, universal banks, which are also advancing in the USA, would not make much sense if they opted for one of these polar options.

But before we continue we should note that in spite of what has been said about the payment system existing in Spain, most customers work with at least two banks and one or another insurance company or other type of financial purveyor in a broad sense. If there is a privileged link – the main account – between a customer and the first, main banking supplier (and if the information systems on customers are comparable to those used in the USA), what more is needed for attempts to get customers to accept financial consolidation to be more successful?

Management of the customer’s relationship with the bank is a failure, despite the excellent information on the customer’s situation and behaviour. And it is not correct to attribute this only to the lack of a “relationship or main account”, as illustrated by the Spanish case. It is impossible to argue against the investments in information systems:

the transformation cost challenge made them necessary customer-centred commercial management demanded them.

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The role of bank personnel in contact with the customer is also a key element in this apparent riddle. Advanced technical tools are now necessary to survive in the banking market, but the role of human resources is no less important. It is only too well understood that in a complicated interactive service such as banking, the employee and customer must be able to understand each other, and this is not probable if their relationship is not based on mutual trust.

5. – From Delivering to Servicing “Cross Buying/Using” Customers

It is taken for granted that until recently banks provided or delivered services to their customers. Growing competition brought differentiation and diversification, which encouraged customers to get their own information on both products and suppliers, that is to gather suitable information so as to be able to take satisfactory buying decisions.

This procedure made sense as long as the supply was not very varied and for customers with simple financial demands. When these conditions do not exist, which is the most common case nowadays, the customer is faced with a difficult challenge: how to take appropriate buying decisions based on:

complex information on the products to be bought how to use the products (including the choice of channel in each case)

their own personal values and preferences.

The customer must become familiar with means of payment, savings, investment and credit products, insurance – and real estate assets. These are products whose interdependence is often complex and not always explicit. It is no wonder that financial decisions should take into account at least three types of variable: yield, risk and costs (direct costs such as fees and indirect costs such as time).

This is a good point to refer to the educational attainment of individuals, since it is important to avoid using it as a brush to sweep away the objections to cross selling’s (and financial consolidation’s) lack of success. It is true that, on average, customers are better educated, better informed from a banking point of view, and even more “financially literate”. That is to say they have greater criterion and ability to take decisions, even complex decisions. This is not the same thing as saying that most of them prefer to do this, except as the lesser of two evils, which is the thesis upheld in these pages. Division of labour and the subsequent specialisation in financial advising (as an alternative to “non-expert self-medication”) is what seems to result from the growing complexity in financial supply.

This complexity is objectified and simplified through packages defined on the basis of customer typologies or segmentation. This is a very important step, since it reduces the customer universe to a more straightforward, and even simpler, reality. However, this device in itself is only part of the solution.

This is because typologies are one thing, however representative they may be of the customer base, their preferences and behaviour, and quite another the customer’s feeling that their case is unique and that it is vital for them that their case should be understood and lead to a suitable recommendation. This approach does not exclude the fact that there may be customers (although not many) inclined towards “pure self-service” or financial autonomy and who are therefore ideal for Internet banking, without the support of any human channel, such as, for example, the telephone.

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This feeling of their uniqueness of demand occurs in both their purchase and use of products and services. For this reason we suggest the use of the label “cross buying/using” in contrast to cross selling. There are three differences in emphasis:

1) for the customer more than for the bank, financial consolidation is a great opportunity and a novel, complex challenge:a. it promises more efficient, more profitable and less risky management than being served by

multiple suppliers; butb. the customer must:

i. assess the interdependence between the buying decisions, use of products and use of channels, and

ii. learn from use and, generally, observe how their preferences and level of satisfaction evolve, even when the service has not objectively changed during the period under consideration;

2) the customers’ major problem lies in their sense of the uniqueness and complexity of their demand, while the seller’s challenge is comparatively smaller and:a. does not lie so much in being able to convey the benefits of consolidation since they know

their customers are normal (they have prototypical profiles) even though they may reveal their demands in assorted different ways, if not inconsistently

b. but rather their great challenge is to win the customer’s trust and turn the perceived uniqueness of the case into the most suitable recommendation on the purchase and use of products and channels.

From this perspective it is easier to understand the difficulties of banks and their competitors in achieving their customers’ financial consolidation. Cross selling is generally carried out as an exercise in selling products:

on the basis of a realistic supposition: the customer needs asset, liability and means of payment products;

but not enough importance is usually attached to the uniqueness felt by the customer, which is presumably not so subjective. This underestimation is probably a result of the combination of:

o the difficulty of transmitting and managing a customer’s flows and funds with a long-term perspective, a perspective that is essential for properly materialising the advantages of consolidation;

o this is probably not so much to do with the great variety of solutions possible as with the difficulty faced by the employee in:

getting the right idea of the flows and funds (over time), and especially interpreting the customer’s preferences and values.

The above indicates that the innovations mentioned have transformed the market more profoundly than is generally supposed by:

turning banking into a technology-intensive industry; changing customers’ opportunities and potential demands radically

opportunities that customers cannot usually resolve, and so the relationship staff, whom we shall call account managers, have become key elements in

present and future banking; making it possible for banks to manage their customers through financial consolidation and to

make what is imprecisely defined as “relationship banking” come true through a combination of:

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an intensive use of investments in physical capital and systems, which provide for the production and distribution processes and procedures (including sales, which is one of their components and not an autonomous reality essentially different from the rest), and

banking staff, or human capital, who have an unbeatable comparative advantage in managing personalised relationships; and of these, counselling is the part with the greatest added value and is a complement to the information systems.

In short, whatever label is used – relationship banking, financial consolidation, or cross buying/using customers – the banking staff that attends to customers face different tasks from those of only a few decades ago.

Below we shall analyse how far this transformation of the banking business has affected the skills demanded of banking staff. Strictly speaking, we shall see how technical change, the deregulation of the sector and commercial innovations:

have transformed the relationship between banking staff and customers, and how they have led – or should lead – to new processes and procedures, duly standardised.

6. – The Derived Demand for Banker Skills

In section 2 we indicated that employment in banking had changed considerably: fewer staff carrying out bureaucratic tasks and more carrying out tasks with a greater degree of responsibility, discretion, or both. Very succinctly, we shall now describe what we consider as basic in the changes that have taken place in the past decades in the skills demanded of banking personnel.

In 1970, the activity of a commercial bank was taken care of by a staff that could be broken down into six occupational levels:

1) the managers: they had become generalists, typically starting out from a professional career begun in the bank including a stage as lending specialists;

2) the loan officers, the most expert and specialist personnel in banking, generally trained by the bank itself (although not necessarily on the job);

3) the bank clerks, who constituted the cogs in the processing of information and had the chance of making a career in the bank;

4) the cashiers employed in transactional banking, with few qualifications, generally without the chance of making a career in the bank and with high turnover;

5) a mixed bag, made up above all of varied service personnel with very low qualifications; and

6) a small group of highly qualified people, among them lawyers and a nascent group of IT experts.

At present, these groupings are still useful, but their relative importance has changed and in some of them the new functions demand important changes in skills and behaviour:

1) the managers are more generalist, if that is possible, but with a greater element of social skills both for managing their team and for attending to customers;

2) the loan officers handle more and more complex information, including support for analysis tools; in the end, however, as before, their work requires above all good evaluation criteria; on the other hand this figure is tending to be replaced by customer managers, and so the element of social skills demanded in these occupations is also increasing;

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3) the number of bank clerks strictly speaking is falling and those that remain are undergoing perhaps the most profound transformation: they are required to stop being bureaucrats – “it is not enough to do their work well” – and also, or rather above all, they must sell to customers; this is euphemistically posed as the need to combine good service with sales, since it is on this that the survival of the bank depends;

4) the counter staff continue to work in transactional banking, but are recognised as making a greater contribution in that they are the people who most often deal with customers; therefore, the importance of social skills, and, in particular, of dealing with people, is also growing. In this category we should include telephone operators, who are often placed closer to counter staff than to qualified clerks, which would make more sense, and who:

a. more and more are carrying out an important function of customer service,b. or of sales, or a combination of both;

5) the size of the “mixed bag” group is falling due to both mechanization and outsourcing;6) the number and variety of experts is growing, above all those related to information systems

management.

This brief – and conventional – description is not applicable to investment banking, to trust banking and to bankers dealing with large companies. In these three cases, as well as a greater emphasis on social skills, they also need greater skills related to customer and product management. Specifically, we should point out that the work of the new group of loan officers with functions of relationship managers, or vice versa, combines, to a greater extent than a few decades ago:

1. computer-assisted instruments and procedures;2. more complex analytical and problem-solving skills;3. listening and counselling skills;4. evaluation and decision-making skills, to the extent that when a counsellor advises a customer

they must opt for a recommended formula as preferable to the others.

We should, however, look more closely at sales skills, which act as a basis for “cross buying/using” or customer management. Cross selling is usually based on product knowledge, understanding and managing product packages in terms of segment typologies and being able to deal appropriately with customers. This is a more complex set of tasks than that entrusted to a traditional administrative employee, but can be carried out by a person who has completed their training at school with specific training learnt in the bank.

Strictly speaking, within the sense of a “job well done” by a lifelong bank clerk, selling, understood as a process, with an appropriately specified procedure, changes the basic skills required. This is not the case with conventional administrative tasks, as can be seen in the following citation from 1985:

“Putting it differently, clerical tasks in front-desk jobs do not use new skills. The skill – the general skill – required before, and after, the introduction of electronic technology is the ability to obtain solutions of informational nature through standard procedures. What has changed is merely the applied information needed to perform the job, in so far as it is equipment specific. However, this information acquisition involves specific training to replace the practices connected with the old technology and it does not require new skills

What demands new skills from job incumbents of front-desk jobs is the selling task. To start with, selling can be viewed as an information problem that involves the matching of a set of possible product-mixes to heterogeneous demands from customers. Selling requires solving this problem by the employee. The solution to the selling problem is complicated by the fact that the

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seller has to explore the range of available options and take the customer inquiry as a much more general matter than a request for a mere predetermined information. The seller has to suggest an arrangement that is both satisfactory to the customer and profitable to the bank. But, the selling task is not just solving a pre-specified problem. It also involves transmitting and persuading –advising- the customer that the suggested offer is the most adequate. In short, the selling task demands analytical and communications skills that were not required for clerical tasks. In the old setting the interface between the customer and the employee, involved a less sophisticated level of communication skills, as exchanges were predetermined, and the solution given in most cases. Moreover, cross-selling techniques (selling several products to a customer) emphasizes the understanding of the interdependency among financial services. Besides, the selling task is closely associated with the quality of service because it is not easy: 1) to identify the standards of quality of service expected by customers, and 2) to enforce and control these standards of performance of front-desk personnel. And it is because of these ambiguities, and the high cost of controlling performance, that the quality of service is in general a major concern on front-desk jobs [the italics were not in the original text] (Bosch, 1985, p. 11-12).

Fifteen years later, this description of sales tasks deserves to be reviewed, precisely because of what has been highlighted in italics. Certain knowledge-related skills are needed for sales. But it is more important – and more difficult – to acquire selling behaviour: it is not enough to know how to do it, it has to be done well with each and every customer.

Indeed, the challenge is more behavioural than intellectual. And we can now go further than that clumsy allusion of 1985 to the relationship between sales and service, and enter the field of processes and subsequent procedures.

Unfortunately, U.S. banking – and other sectors – consider that sales are predominantly creative rather than forming a processed structure. This is a basic error that continues to distort a great deal of sales activity. People speak of the process or stages of “selling” (e.g. arousing interest, overcoming objections and closing the operation), but in contrast do not define, or systematically execute, the procedure – the specific behaviour – a salesman must follow. The sequence of conducts from the moment an employee enters into contact with a customer (current or potential) to the moment they say goodbye are not usually defined.

This view of sales is doubly unfortunate:1. because it leaves to the discretion of employees conducts that could be provided to them in a

well-defined through the corresponding training, and this generates anxiety, uncertainty and arbitrariness;

2. with this way of promoting the sales action, a large part of banking tradition, typical of any bureaucratic organisation that handles information reliably, has been lost: the sense of – and obsession with – doing things well, of respect for and appreciation of procedure, a culture that permeated through to new employees. Procedure and its fulfilment (behaviours) are the touchstones of satisfactory service.

From the above we can infer how important are the behaviours that reflect a culture of work well done. This is the case of behaviour-referred sales that systematically cater to the customer’s intellectual (and emotional) challenge of what to buy and how, and where and when to use it. In other words, the emphasis shifts from “selling several products” to how to behave in order to gain the customer’s confidence and recommend what is most suitable for him or her.

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Behaviours that generate confidence. That is the question. For this reason it is a good idea to go beyond the so-called association between service and sales: service and sales are the same – if you wish, parts of a whole – from the moment when the customer considers that there is an essential interdependence between the purchase and the use of products and services. The customer manager must treat them as one whole, because that is the way the customer perceives them. This is essential because: banking exists in a buyers’ market and is no longer an industry dominated by supply and its patterns. In this sense “cross selling of products” is a relic of a past that resists giving way to a type of banking that does indeed revolve around the customer. A customer that would be very well served by a bank that really knew how to sell him or her (and sell is the exact word) financial consolidation.

In short, there are at present more social skills, in the form of specific behaviours, associated with the occupations in present and future banking. And for certain groups, more skills related to the processing of financial information, on both products and customers. This brings us to the central question of our study, which can be subdivided into two:

1. To what extent have the transformations undergone by banking affected its training practices and altered the educational requirements demanded of its new employees?

2. Has the evolution in the supply of graduates from the educational system affected hiring and bank career policies?

We find the answers to these questions in the following section. Before that, however, we should point out that since banking employment accounts for less than 2% of total employment in the USA, trends in employment and personnel policy in banking do not have a substantial impact on the supply of the educational system.

7. – The Educational Qualifications of Bankers and the Supply of the Educational System

In the past banks used to train their own staff, either on or off the job. In all cases, experience, or learning by doing, was doubly important:

1. not everything that had to be done could be learned off the job, or the bank preferred on the job learning;

2. very often it was the behaviours that were understood as important and suitable for each post that were learned on the job.

The previous section described the demand for skills and below we shall classify them into skills for solving the two main types of problems identified:

those associated with information processing those resulting from selling.

The usefulness of this approach can be seen when analysing how far banks and the educational system train for, or develop, the skills mentioned. In this study it is understood that the reality of two decades ago, as illustrated in the citation following this paragraph, already suggested what today is the general situation for banking personnel:

they use additional knowledge, of which the general-type knowledge is provided by the educational system; and

new behaviours are demanded, which are not provided by the educational system.

“Taking front-desk jobs as an illustration, it can be argued that clerical skills, when defined as abilities to solve information problems (handling, computation, and transmission of data using

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paper or electronically based supports) can be translated educationally as functional literacy and the “three RS”. This educational content can be defined as general training, i.e., training in solving a given type of problems. Whereas the ability to handle equipment of a given maker, or the paper forms of a particular bank is specific training, since the tasks are based on problems peculiar to a given organization. This definition of training or education in terms of the generality of the problem-solving abilities developed is consistent with the views of G. Becker, who identifies the degree of generality by the number of firms that find the training useful, whereas here it is suggested that it is a consequence of the degree of generality of the problem-solving ability. In other words, as a result of defining skills as problem-solving abilities, education can be classified according to the contents –the type of problems it teaches the student to solve.

The potential usefulness of this definition can be seen through the analysis of the educational process and objectives required to develop a given skill. Skills that are pertinent to selling can be expressed as a combination of: 1) solving an information problem –matching a demand to a mix of products to be selected from the bank’s product range; 2) being able to handle the human interface with the customer; and 3) combining them into the ability to advise and persuade the customer to take the suggested product mix. The solution to the first type of problem to be solved demands analytical abilities and their development can be taken as a traditional goal of education, though it is not obvious what part or aspect of education contributes to this. Moreover, the “art” of persuasion, together with dealing with customers (people) is not just a matter of cognitive or of manipulative skills. It requires an attitude, a “style” or a behaviour, that is different from the ability to solve problems. This social skill is not easily translated into educational specifications adequate to developing this non-cognitive skill” (Bosch, 1985, p. 12-13).

This citation from 1985 is applicable to the banking personnel of 2000 and of future years: additional skills are demanded of banking personnel that can be obtained in the workplace or in educational centres (before and after being hired by a bank). This training situation is closely linked to an important transformation in banking careers, as summarised in the following description from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

“Training and Advancement [in Banking]

Bank tellers and other clerks usually need only a high school education. Most banks seek people who have good basic math and communication skills, enjoy public contact, and feel comfortable handling large amounts of money. Through a combination of formal classroom instruction and on-the-job training under the guidance of an experienced worker, tellers learn the procedures, rules, and regulations that govern their jobs. Banks encourage upward mobility by providing access to higher education and other sources of additional training.

Tellers and clerks prepare for positions with more responsibilities by taking courses accredited by the American Institute of Banking, an educational affiliate of the American Bankers Association, and the Institute of Financial Education. These organizations have several hundred chapters in cities across the country and numerous study groups in small communities. Most banks use the facilities of these organizations, which assist local banks in conducting cooperative training programs or developing independent programs. Some community colleges

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also offer courses for employed tellers and those seeking to become tellers. Taking these courses can give applicants an advantage over other jobseekers.

Some banks have their own training programs, which result in teller certification. Experienced tellers qualify for certification by taking required courses and passing examinations. Experienced tellers and clerks may advance to head teller, new accounts clerk, or customer service representative. Outstanding tellers who have had some college or specialized training offered by the banking industry are sometimes promoted to managerial positions.

Workers in executive, administrative, and managerial banking jobs usually have at least a college degree. A bachelor’s degree in business administration or a liberal arts degree with business administration courses is suitable preparation, as is a bachelor’s degree in any field followed by a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree. Many financial management positions are filled by promoting experienced, technically skilled professional personnel –for example, accountants, auditors, budget analysts, credit analysts, insurance analysts, or securities analysts- or accounting or related department supervisors of large banks.

Financial services sales representatives usually need a college degree; a major or courses in finance, accounting, economics, marketing, or related fields serve as excellent preparation. Experience in sales is also very helpful. These workers learn on the job under the supervision of bank officers. Sales representatives selling securities need to be licensed by the national Association of Securities.

Advancement to higher-level executive, administrative, managerial, and professional positions may be accelerated by special study. Banks often provide opportunities for workers to broaden their knowledge and skills, and they encourage employees to take classes offered by the AIB and IFE as well as courses at local colleges and universities. In addition, financial management and banking associations, often in cooperation with colleges and universities, sponsor numerous national or local training programs. Each of their schools deal with a different phase of financial management and banking, such as accounting management, budget management, corporate cash management, financial analysis, international banking, and data processing systems procedures and management. Employers also sponsor seminars and conferences and provide textbooks and other educational materials. Many employers pay all or part of the costs for those who successfully complete courses.

In recent years, the banking field has been revolutionized by technological improvements in computer and data processing equipment. Knowledge of their application is vital to upgrade managerial skills and to enhance advancement opportunities” (www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs027.htm#nature;2000).

This description of the relationship between employment and training shows how banking continues to solve its own specific training, and, to a certain extent, its behavioural training, as in the case of tellers, or cashiers, while at the same time taking advantage of the educational system to supply the part represented by general-type knowledge. The importance attached by banking to academic qualifications is increasing, especially for management and commercial (or relationship) posts, in what seems to be a recognition of the certification of specific and general-type knowledge.

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The average educational attainment of employees in Finance, Insurance and Real Estate was higher than the average for workers as a whole in the USA in 1996. Hardly any people were employed who did not have at least a High School certificate, and the percentage of employees with college education – with or without a degree – was higher. This educational breakdown was practically identical to that in the banking subsector, excluding Security, Commodity Brokerage & Investment Companies, which employed much higher percentages of university degrees, both Bachelor and postgraduate (see Table 3). Sufficient data is not available, however, for a historical analysis of the whole sector or of banking in particular.

This description, however, clashes with the statements of senior and human resource banking management. More and more better trained people are still needed, that is to say a greater proportion of graduates. This does not seem to be inferred from the information presented here. It is another question as to whether hiring graduates has its advantages, as seen here, which are substantial, as are the associated costs also.

This is not the same as saying that the banking transformation and the skills demanded require greater academic training than in the past. This is not the case, because with the personnel policies of the past, and taking into account the concentration of banks under way, it would be possible to provide suitable training for staff hired and for those who have joined recently.

Moreover, hiring graduates to a certain extent conveys an implicit message: it is cognitive skills that are the most important (which is not the same as merely saying they are more important than a few decades ago), and social-type behaviours are not really important. Another doubt that is difficult to neutralise is the existence of so many university graduates in relatively flat organisations, with the subsequent effect on professional career expectations, both for graduates and non-graduates.

The banking managers’ preferences mentioned above usually respond to one or more of the following considerations:

1. the growing supply of students obtaining qualifications from the educational system lowers the cost of hiring graduates (with a full university degree or not) and may reduce training costs (particularly those of a general kind) Compared to the past, the cost of a graduate has fallen, compared to that of a non-graduate. That is to say, for a little more money, it is possible to hire a better trained person with greater potential for learning (above all cognitive learning);

2. the effects of changes in the market and in information systems on the “basic training necessary for the future” of personnel joining banks is overestimated. And, overestimated or not, accounting and financial training, for example, can be acquired once the worker has been hired by the bank (internally or at an external training centre);

3. when almost 30% of young people have a university degree and around 90% have successfully completed high school, hiring people without qualifications is usually associated with unnecessary risks. Qualifications become a mixture of a “filter” and an “insurance policy” to reduce selection errors (and to avoid criticisms of “lack of suitable educational requirements in the selection procedure”);

4. the preference for a growing number of qualified people is consistent with a customer base – the U.S. population – whose educational attainment has undergone an extraordinary improvement in recent decades, as indicated by the percentages observed in the previous point;

5. banking, as a sociological group, may not want to be outdone by other sectors in its proportion of “highly qualified” employees. This supposition is difficult to verify, but there are many circumstantial signs to substantiate it.

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In short, managers’ preferences for a higher percentage of graduates have an economic foundation. Whether or not it is the most efficient option is less clear. An estimate of its cost effectiveness, including the risks of such policies, cannot be limited to simple arithmetic: the assessment contains a qualitative part and no little conjecture, in that the effects are observed in the long term.

We do not put forward a clear pronouncement on the subject in this study, precisely because of this unavoidable lack of precision. Although we certainly do not assume that banking is lacking in graduates. And we must always include the reservation that we are generalising for a sector that ranges from investment banks, which carry out a comparatively much more complex type of banking than banks that specialise in consumer banking, for example. For this reason, the proportion of graduates must undoubtedly be higher in the former than in the latter.

To sum up, the importance held by training in the hiring and promotion of banking staff has been gradually increasing. This refers to both training received in the general educational system and job-related and specific supplier-related training.

As for the future, everything seems to indicate that the trends outlined here will continue. However, we shall also comment on the effect that e-banking may have on the subject. This exercise will help us to place in perspective changes – such as those related to the purchase, use or sale of products and services – in what, at first sight, may be considered a revolutionary transformation of the banking industry.

8. – Is E-Banking “Another” Banking Revolution?

E-banking is undoubtedly a major development in banking. It offers easy – and cheap – access to most banking services at any time and from anywhere. To many, it is not sufficiently user-friendly in dealing with product information, and even less friendly in handling purchases of complex products such as a mortgage.

Nonetheless, Internet has stimulated the comparison of offers – prices and other conditions – of different suppliers. The example of mortgages is revealing: the customer can compare on one single page the offers of different suppliers. User-friendly or not, easy to analyse or not, the information available in Internet is extraordinarily better than a customer can obtain by visiting branches or by phone.

Internet is also convenient and efficient for relatively simple transactions. Security issues are probably no more worrying than, say, card fraud – an important hole in payment system security, after decades of experience and new technologies.

Even more remarkable is the kind of “great leap forward” offered by e-banking in self-service. Forerunners such as automatic cash dispensers were extraordinary. But e-banking offers a range of services, not only greater, but similar to those of a branch office, independent of location or time limitations. Thus, ease of purchase is complemented by accessibility, which is the true challenge of any Internet provider wishing to satisfy smart consumers (Montenegro, 2000, p. 11).

The innovation is less revolutionary, however, when compared to the growing availability of phone (home) banking. Again, this is more limited than e-banking, but makes it possible to overcome the time

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and place limitations of a branch office with a broad range of services. This leads us to conclude that e-banking is simply one more banking channel. A channel in which self-service is more important, but not uniformly so. This is the key point to its links with the considerations of this study.

In a way, the most innovative element of e-banking is the opportunity it provides for:1. carrying out transactions through self-service; and2. as an information channel. Even here, it could be argued that what it offers in this sense is

simply an improvement on traditional paper brochures – a different medium that enables calculations and simulations (which also appeared, more clumsily, in brochures).

On the other hand, however, e-banking is no improvement on the reality of other channels for managing what is considered in this study as the most common case: that of a customer who does not know very well what products or services it would be good for them to buy, with what characteristics, how and when and through which channels, in order to take most advantage of their receipt and payment flows in relation to their wealth situation and prospects.

All in all, with the arrival of e-banking, the challenge faced by banking in attaining their customers’ financial consolidation continues, or rather becomes more complicated. Paradoxically, the more channels a customer has available, the more difficult relationship banking (suitably personalised) seems. This is the same as calling attention to the fact that the customer manager – the person who first gains the customer’s trust and then helps them to resolve their doubts and uncertainty about what to buy and how to use it – is, if anything, more important. This perspective, as we have suggested, unites sales and service into one single reality: being available to the customer to help them take their interdependent decisions on the purchase and use of products and access to channels.

There is one important reservation. The customer is gradually coming to expect a broader service than that provided by the branch office timetable and it is not always worth their while to make the journey there, whether or not they are e-banking users. This is where phone (home) banking emerges with its tremendous potential. It is as user-friendly a channel as any other (when it is used properly) and can be available at any time (although not for the whole range of services).

The label “bricks and clicks” is highly suggestive. As a conclusion to this document we should just like to note that, as a halfway house, phone, or home, banking should be used as an ideal channel for counselling the customer, and not just for aggressive sales (never better expressed) or for dealing with simple enquiries. With this reflection on e-banking, we shall leave for the future the outline we have drawn in this study, which can be summed up in the following observations:

1. banking personnel, generally speaking, need more social and communicational skills than in the past, precisely because they are faced with a buyers’ market and they must help these buyers to opt for what would be for them the advantages of financial consolidation (rather than providing them, with differing degrees of success, with a simple series of products);

2. the educational system provides the generalist training (economic, financial and management) but does not transmit the social skills (behaviours) that are demanded;

3. the challenge of financial consolidation is not easy, as demonstrated by the banks’ lack of success in achieving it. The problem is not the cognitive component itself, but rather because the proper behaviours to generate trust in the customer, a key variable for financial consolidation, are not forthcoming (generally because the opportune procedures are not properly specified either).

4. thus what remains pending is a better specification of the procedures that must guide the relationship between customer and bank. These procedures will combine different proportions,

25

according to the different segments, of personalised attention and self-service. This same lack continues to be observed in e-banking.

26

References

American Banking Association, www.banking.comwww.banking.com/aba

Ballarín, E., Estrategias Competitivas de la Banca ;Barcelona: Ariel, segunda edición, 1989.

Bank Administration Institute, www.bai.org

Bartel, Ann P., “Human Resource Management and Performance in the Service Sector: The Case of Bank Branches”; NBER Working Paper No. W7467, January 2000

Bosch, Francisco, -The Economics of Training in Commercial Computing in Spain, PhD. Dissertation, University of London 1976- Retail Banking and Technology: An Analysis of Skill Mix Transformation; University of

Stanford, IFG Working Paper, 1985.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov

Burns, Arthur F. The Ongoing Revolution in American Banking; Washington, D.C., American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1988.

Calomaris, Charles W., U.S. Bank Deregulation in Historical Perspective; Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Colino, Carlos, “Creating a Payments Factory in an Emerging Market”; Global Payments Council. San Francisco October 2000. Lafferty Conferences (London).

Council on Financial Competition, Mixed Messages. Consumer`s Views on Financial Consolidation; Washington DC.,Corporate Executive Board, 2000

Covington, Howard E. Jr. & Marion A. Ellis, The Story of NationsBank.Changing the Face of American Banking; Chapel Hill & London, The Univerity of North Carolina Press. 1993.

Euromoney,London.Ganging up against the Big Boys”; October 200, pp.50-52.“Both Sides`Second Choice”; October 2000. pp.62-68.www.euromoney.com

FDIC, Quaterly Banking Profile,Second Quarter 2000.www.fdic.gov

Federal Reserve System, www.federalreserve.gov

Financial Times, www.ft.com

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Hubbard, R. Glenn, “Executive Pay and Performance: Evidence from the U.S. Banking Industry·”; NBER Working Paper Series, April 1994.

Miller, Richard B., American Banking in Crisis.Views from Leading Financial Services CEOs; Homewood, Dow Jones-Irwin, 1990

Montenegro, José A., “Internet y la Capapcidad de Elegir”; Expansión, Madrid, 30 December 2000. p.11.

Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, www.occ.treas.gov

Retail Banker International; London,“European Banks Take a Lead in Multichannel Integration”; No. 443, 30 November, pp. 1,12 &13.“Living in a Wired World”; No. 444, 12 December 2000, pp.4-5“Millenium Musings”; No.444, 12 December 2000, pp.5-6“Optimism Meets the Cash Burn, Head-on”; N.444.12 December 2000,pp.11 to 14

Rogers, David, The Future of American Banking. Managing for Change; New York, McGaw-Hill, Inc., 1993.

The Economist, London.“A Survey of E-Management: Inside the Machine”; November 11th. 2000“A Survey oE-Entertainment: Thrills and Spills”; October 7th, 2000“A Survey of Online Finan ce: The Virtual Threat”; May 20th. 2000“ A Survey of Technology in Finance: Turning Digits into Dollars”, October 26th. 1996 www.economist.com

US Banker, www.usbanker.com

U.S. Census Bureau, Educational Attainment in the United States; March 1999 (issued August 2000)

Valentine, Lisa, “First Union Tackles CRM with CRMS”, ABA Banking Journal, October 1999, pp.66-66.

Wall Street Journal, www.wallstreet.com

White, Lawrance H., editor, The Crisis in American Banking; New York, NewYork University Press.1993.

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STATISTICAL ANNEX

29

Table 1. Employed Persons in Finance, Insurance and Real Estate 1983 - 1999

1983 1983 1999 1999

Total, 16 years old and over 6511 100% 8815 100%

Managerial and professional speciality occ 1606 25% 3044 35%

Technical, sales and administrative support occ 4408 68% 5024 59%

Technicians and related support occ 115 2% 200 2%

Sales occ 1509 23% 2224 25%

Administrative support occ including clerical 2784 43% 2780 32%

Others 497 8% 567 6%

Source : BLS

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Table 2. Employment of Wage and Salary Workers in Banking by Occupation, 1998, and Projected Change, 1998-2008

(Employment in thousands)

Occupation1998 Employment 1998-2008

Percent change

NumberPercent

All occupations 2,042 100.0 2.8

Administrative support, including clerical 1,351 66.2 -3.1

Bank tellers 542 26.5 -6.4

Office and administrative support supervisors and managers 139 6.8 17.9

New account clerks, banking 97 4.8 13.9

Loan and credit clerks 87 4.3 5.1

General office clerks 86 4.2 -28.5

Bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks 62 3.0 -9.2

Secretaries 52 2.6 -10.5

Adjustment clerks 43 2.1 21.3

Duplicating, mail, and other office machine operators 27 1.3 -28.3

Bill and account collectors 25 1.2 11.1

Executive, administrative, and managerial 503 24.6 10.6

Loan officers and counselors 116 5.7 12.8

Financial managers 97 4.8 7.2

General managers and top executives 67 3.3 7.9

Accountants and auditors 31 1.5 4.7

Marketing and sales 77 3.8 29.0

Securities, commodities, and financial services sales representatives 38 1.9 45.4

Professional specialty 67 3.3 34.4

Computer systems analysts, engineers, and scientists 45 2.2 48.8

Service 24 1.2 4.4

All other occupations 21 1.0 0.0Source: BLS

1999

2%

200

2% Sa

les occ Others

8%

567

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Table 3. Employment and Educational Attainment, in 1996 (Annual Averages)

Detailed industry and class of worker Less than a high school

diploma

High school diploma no

college

Some college, no

degreeAssociate

degreeBachelor´s

degree

Master´s degree and Doctoral or professional

degree

(Both sexes, age 16 and older)Total 12.9 32.3 20.6 8.1 17.6 8.5

Finance, insurance, & real estate 1.9 31.1 27.6 8.3 25.0 5.9

Banking et al (*) 1.7 30.7 27.2 9.6 25.1 5.8

Security, commodity brokerage, & investment companies

1.2 14.8 18.5 5.6 44.8 15.2

Insurance 2.1 28.7 23.4 9.1 29.6 7.1

Real estate, including real-estate insurance offices

11.3 32.5 24.6 8.3 17.6 5.7

(*) Banking et al. includes: Banking, Savings institutions, includings credit unions, Credit agencies, n.e.c.

Source: CPS

32

Source:FDIC

33

Source: FDIC

34

Figure 3. Employment in the Financial Sector in the US 1990 and 1996

Source: US Census Bureau.

35

Figure 4. Employed Persons in Finance, Insurance and Real Estate 1993 and 1999

Source: CPS

36

Figure 5. The More the Merrier

Mean Number of Providers:In 1992= 2.7In 1998= 3.2

Percentageof U.S.Households

37

Figure 6. Interest in Consolidation

Source: American Banker 1987. Survery of Consumer Attitudes

Source: American Banker 1987. Survey of Consumer Attitudes

38

39

"Consolidated" consumers defined as those whose financial products are domiciled at only one institution.

Percentage of Respondents Stating "Yes"

Source: 2000 Council on FinancialCompetition Consolidation Survey

40

41

42

43

Incrased Risk

UncompetitivePricing

Insufficient Capabilities

44

Figure 13. U.S. Payment SystemsDollars Purchase Volume Market Share

Source: Colino, 2000.

Cash19%

Cheques49%

Cards26%

Other

1998

Excludes indirectPayments

45

Figure 14. The Relationship Account . and Financial Consolidation

Source: Adaptation from Council on Financial Competition

Checking/CurrentAccount Transaction Patterns Flow of Funds Purchase Patterns Channel Usage

Mutual Funds/Unit Trusts Assets Risk Preferences

Overdraft Credit History

Savings Account Balances Incomes Flow of Funds Channel Usage

Brokerage Assets Risk Preferences Transaction Behavior Flow of Funds Channel Usage

Mortgage Credit History Income Debts Assets

Credit Card Credit History Purchase Behavior Payment History

HELOC Credit History Home Value

Installment Loans Credit History Purchase Behavior

CDs Balances

Life Insurance Children Marital Status Employment

P&C (General)Insurance Car and Home Value Luxury Goods

Savings & Investments

... a chain reactionof product sales and customer dataacquisition canbegin...

Financing

Demographic Data Age Sex Address Real stateAssets

House in town Countru house

46