Banking on Innovation High Impact Creative Thinking Training

You know the drill: Competition's up. Profits are down. And everything you're doing is changing. It's the 21st century and most of us are reeling — out of breath, out of time, and out of what's left of our minds. It's business as unusual whether we like it or not — and it's time to do something different. But what? And, more specifically, how?

Enter Banking On Innovation — a unique, creative thinking training that gives absolutely anyone in your organization a unique opportunity to step back, slow down, think big, and become a creative force for positive change.

This highly interactive 1-3 day learning experience is suitable for both intact work teams and open enrollment groups. And its impact doesn't end after the happy sheets are filled out. We offer graduates a wide range of post-workshop support to keep their commitment to innovate alive and well

Participants will...

• Use the training to focus on a new business opportunity or challenge
• Become painlessly aware of their inner and outer obstacles to innovation
• Identify and go beyond their own limiting assumptions
• Learn and apply 7 powerful creative thinking tools
• Gain deep insights into what it takes to be an innovator
• Generate a wide range of new ideas to make a difference on-the-job
• Brainstorm effectively with peers
• Adapt best innovation practices to their own sphere of influence
• Re-discover the sleeping genius within them
• Take personal responsibility for living the value of innovation
• Become refreshed, renewed, and revitalized

Participants won't...
Yawn  Lose interest  Fry  Wish they were somewhere else  Waste their time  Nod out  Space out  Hold out  Squirm  Leave early  Wish they had gone into their father's business

Where Else Has Idea Champions Taught this Course?
AT&T  Lucent Technologies  MTV Networks  GE  General Mills  Con Edison  PricewaterhouseCoopers  Ernst & Young  ATMI  First Chicago  Houston Lighting & Power  Met Life  Goodyear Tire  Michelin  Scotia Capital  Chicago Board of Trade

Watch a short video about Idea Champions and excerpts from a Banking on Innovation training. Call us and talk to a consultant about the Banking on Innovation live session for your organization.

The Greater Buffalo Savings Bank was founded in 1999 with the motto ‘banking, the way it used to be’ and has been positioned as a local community savings bank for the Western New York region. FST met up with co-founder and CEO Andrew Dorn to find out.

If the northeast is the land of the savings bank, then Buffalo is, in many ways, its spiritual center. In the past, Buffalo was home to the largest savings bank in the country, and the thrift industry once dominated the local banking scene. Indeed, the residents of the Greater Buffalo area spawned the growth of savings banking, which emphasized direct personal service for customers and investment in the community.

Although many of the area’s savings banks later fell prey to the financial turmoil of the 1980s, a group of Buffalo area business leaders joined together in 1998 to lay plans for the creation of a new bank called Greater Buffalo Savings Bank. Their mission was to bring back the type of retail banking that had been the hallmark of the local community for over a century. To bring the idea for GBSB to fruition, the organizers spearheaded a stock sale that generated more than US$11 million in capital – purchased by more than 800 shareholders, the overwhelming majority of whom were from the local area. GBSB was only the second new stockholder owned savings bank ever created in New York State and the US$11 million in capital represented the most ever raised by a non-affiliated bank organizing group in the state.

Since its opening, the bank has gone from strength to strength, adhering to the principles upon which it was founded – ‘banking, the way it used to be’ – and the rapid build up of customer accounts is proof that the area’s residents are once again happy to have a full-service, customer-oriented savings bank with which to deal.

Co-founder Andrew Dorn has served as CEO and President of Greater Buffalo Savings Bank since it began operations in 1999. A banking industry veteran, he also served in the same capacity for Jamestown Savings Bank from 1995-1998. FST was recently lucky enough to speak with Dorn to find out a bit more about the bank’s strategy for growth and why a return to traditional banking values is paying dividends.

FST. You helped found the Greater Buffalo Savings Bank in 1999. Could you explain a little bit about the thinking behind the launch of the bank?
AD. Back in 1995 I had started the Jamestown Savings Bank, in Jamestown, NY – which is only 30 miles from Buffalo – and sold it in 1998 as a successful business. I’m an old Buffalonian and I knew there was a big niche in the Buffalo marketplace to do something similar here. Prior to the early 1990s, the old Buffalo Savings Bank had a huge market share, along with around half-a-dozen other savings banks that were also significant players. However, when the banking laws changed in the 1980s, they de-mutualized, did a lot of things they shouldn’t have (such as development and real-estate loans out of the market) and when interest rates went crazy they wound up going out of business or being acquired by commercial banks. So there was a big void. The Greater Buffalo market is a US$26 billion market yet there wasn’t a single bank that had ‘Buffalo’ in its name.

So we decided to start a savings bank. The banking charter for a savings bank or a commercial bank are almost identical now, so for us it was really a marketing ploy more than anything. We wanted to position ourselves as a saving depository of choice and have customers come in because they remembered the good old days. Any customer in our marketplace that’s over the age of 40 generally had their first banking relationship with the old Buffalo Savings Bank through a bank-at-school program.

In addition, the Western NY market is unusual in that it’s pretty under-banked; we’re the 42nd largest metropolitan area ranked by deposit, but there’s only 17 banks operating here with 300 branches. Comparable sized metropolitan areas have 50 banks and 500 branches. So we saw an opportunity to go out and establish a full service community bank to fill that niche. We started with a handful of people in one location in downtown Buffalo, and we just opened our 14th office in August; our associates now number around 250.

FST. Other than being a savings bank, how else do you differentiate yourself from the competition?
AD. Well, we introduced free checking into Western NY – now everyone has a banner out front saying free checking. But the way we’ve really tried to differentiate ourselves is by the way we interact with our customers and the level of customer service and support we aim to give. Our biggest competitors in this market are monsters: HSBC has the biggest market share; M&T has the second largest. Both are terrific banks, but they’re huge banks with operations all over the place, and their focus isn’t only on Western NY.

One of the things we really wanted to do when we opened the bank was that we always wanted our people to be the gateway to the technology. Many people are turned off when they try to call a branch bank and can’t get through to that branch – they get put through to a call centre in India or Indonesia or some place. We wanted to make sure that someone always answered the phone and when they asked to check on their balances, we could give them choices. So we can transfer you to Andy and he can check the balance, or we have a great voice response system that’s available 24/7 at no cost, or we can set you up with internet banking for free. But you’ve always got an individual as the gateway to the technology. Our big competitors are exactly the opposite – technology is the gateway to their people, and customers often get frustrated pressing one, two, three and having to sit there listening to all those menu options.

I’ll give you another example. Say a customer comes in with a check for US$1000 that they want to cash. One of the first things we do when you come in to open an account is that we scan your driving license – so that when you later come in looking to cash your check you just give your account number and up pops your driver’s license with your picture and signature on it. We can then just look at it, check that the picture and signature are the same, cash the check and tell you to have a good day. Any other bank you go to is going to want a couple of forms of identification, some will go on and finger print you, so we can be so much more customer friendly and customer service driven because all our products run off one system.

FST. So what kind of technology do you have to facilitate this focus on customer service?
AD. One of the biggest advantages of opening a new bank is that you can utilize new technology. We have terrific technology; it is far superior across the board to what the big guys can do, because we didn’t have all those old legacy systems. When we started back in 1998 we partnered with a company called Open Solutions Inc., which had developed the fist relational-based database operating system for banks. It’s a big Oracle database with one customer information file that runs any and every product that you want to offer, both on the lending and deposit side.

It allows us to offer everything from old-fashioned passbook savings accounts to full internet banking and everything in between. We run that in a service bureau environment – we have a bunch of file servers and a WAN that fiber optically connects all our branches to our servers. Everything we do is online and real-time. So if you come in and make a deposit, you’ll see the deposit online as soon as we enter it.

FST. And you haven’t had any problems upgrading the technology since 1999?
AD. The only change we’ve had since we started is the Check 21 technology – the remote capture of checks. Instead of having to run checks through a coder and a sorter, we can just remotely capture them in a scanner and transmit them directly. That’s saved us a ton of time and money as we no longer have to send checks to be encoded and then scanned. We were one of the first banks to capture that technology way before we had to, and now we can set up our customers for remote capture of deposits. If we have a big enough customer we give them a scanner so they don’t even need to come to our branch. If we’re talking to non-cash businesses, which most are, we can bank it even if it’s located in an area not convenient for our offices. It can remotely make deposits and between our internet banking and cash management options it doesn’t have to go to a branch. Given that we have 14 offices to HSBC’s 70 in the region, this levels the playing field in a big way.

FST. In terms of your own growth, you have 14 branches and another six planned. Is that an end point for you, a natural size, or would you like to go further?
AD. As of the last numbers from the FDIC, which are now a little over a year old, we had a 2.27 percent market share in our market. We think if we work hard at it, if we do things in the right way, if we offer the right products and support them with the right people and great customer service, and if we’re competitive on interest rates, we can grow our market share to five or six percent over a reasonable time period. We’ve had a fabulous reception from the community, and I expect that to continue. We think we can grow the bank substantially from where we are now, and continue to offer the same type of individual customer service that we do currently.

FST. And with your operating system, expansion is simply a question of scaling up and plugging in new branches?
AD. Yes. We have a hub here, and we just need a fiber optic connection to our branches. Fortunately, Western NY has been pretty well wired and there is a bunch of different fiber optic systems around the city and the suburbs we serve, so it hasn’t been a problem. We just hook the branch into our data room here, run it through our file server and away we go. The technology cost is a fraction of what it would have been 20 years ago. Ours is a PC operating system, and we’ve gone from a situation where workstations cost US$2200 six years ago to one where they now cost US$600.

Our competitors are all trying to make transitions to new types of operating systems. They develop all these new products and they’re trying to move their customers to them – they’re great products, but really what stands behind it is they want to get them into a new operating environment. We started with that operating environment and that was really the best decision we made – we looked at lots of the old legacy systems and a lot of the old service bureau providers, and we’re just so thrilled we didn’t get into that.

GBSB: a brief history
Greater Buffalo Savings Bank (GBSB) is a locally owned and operated full-service community bank that serves the residents and businesses located throughout Western New York. GBSB was chartered in November 1999 to fill the need for a customer service oriented community bank – a need created by the demise of Buffalo’s savings banks and the continued consolidation of the large regional, national and international banks that dominate the area.

Despite its relatively short history, GBSB now serves more than 20,000 depositors and close to 3500 borrowers. Of the more than 9000 banking institutions in the US, GBSB is now among the largest 1000 and it has already surpassed several area banks that have operated in this area for more than a century in terms of size.

The bank provides a wide range of services from ‘old fashioned’ passbook savings accounts to full internet banking. In addition, GBSB provides commercial banking services to the local business community, including business checking and savings accounts, commercial loans and merchant banking services.

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