Commerce Bank undergoes a branch makeover

05.09.2006
If there was a bank reality TV show called "Branch Makeover," Commerce Bank should have been on it. Until last year, most of the tellers at the St. Louis bank's 340 Midwestern branches operated as if the personal computer age had never happened.

"We actually have a pretty sophisticated Web platform system that our more specialized bankers use," said Chuck Kim, executive vice president for retail administration for the parent company, Commerce Bancshares Inc. But "our tellers were still using 10-key Sharp calculators," he said. "It was cheap, and our tellers were pretty fast using them. But we realized that with our tellers being a key touchpoint for our customers, we could no longer live with them being so information-deprived."

Moreover, Commerce Bank had recently bought a number of small banks in its three-state footprint that encompasses Illinois, Kansas and Missouri. Some had more advanced teller systems, some had more primitive ones. Either way, they needed to be standardized, Kim said.

Last year, Commerce Bank hired Getronics NV. The Dutch IT vendor claims 17 out of the top 20 banks around the world as customers, with 28 percent of its revenues coming from the financial services sector, according to Michael Kerr, vice president of financial services at Amsterdam-based Getronics.

"We do not develop core banking systems. We do only front-end systems. But we are totally accustomed to connecting the two," Kerr said.

Much of Getronics' business comes from banks like Commerce Bank that want to upgrade the antiquated technology at their branches. Many of these banks had held off upgrading their branch offices in the late 1990s as pundits declared -- wrongly so far -- that Web banking would spell the end of bank branches.