The Death of Relationships

William W Streeter, Editor-in-Chief The younger generation could care less about building a relationship with a banker. The Nebraska who said that was participating in a discussion on the impact of mergers on community banks, a summary of which appeared in the July issue of Bank Directors Briefing, the monthly newsletter penned by our Executive Editor, Steve Cocheo. The banker's point was that the big banks could offer more technology-based services that appealed to younger customers than community banks could match, whereas personal relationships, the strong suit of small banks, counted forlittle with people under 50. Is he right? The answer depends in part on what is meant by relationship, Technically speaking, a bank has a relationship with anyone it does business with. But what the likely meant was a business relationship based on, if not friendship, then a shake-their-hand, look-'em-in-the-eye kind of association. The answer also depends a great deal on where you are. While plenty of hands get shaken in a big city, on the whole, cities are more impersonal than small communities. There is nothing new about this, but the influence of technology has amplified the impersonal at the expense of the personal in late Twentieth Century society. Not all technology is distancing-the telephone, the automobile, and the Internet shrunk the globe by bringing people together. But in other ways technology has distanced customers from businesses serving them, particularly with the advent-in banking-of self-service delivery. As for the notion that younger people don't want a relationship with their banker, remember that young people are always more interested in whatever the newest thing is, like computers. Also, we suspect that people who never go into a branch and don't have a banker nevertheless a relationship with their bank. It's just a different kind of relationship. The truth is, it's often more efficient and at times, regrettably, more pleasant dealing with an impersonal device than with a person. That's more of an urban view, to be sure, but while employees in small-town banks are invariably good at customer relations, this alone isn't enough to keep traffic coming into the bank lobby. The Nebraska banker's premise was that big banks could offer more technology-based services than smaller banks. We've said in these pages (as recently as last month's Technology Topics) that smaller banks an advantage in technology because the big banks such cumbersome systems to contend with. …