Banking on Tomorrow

If Willy Wonka had made home-equity loans instead of Everlasting Gobstoppers, he might have worked in a place like the Merlin Center. As unlikely as it sounds, the 30,000-square-foot facility located in Stamford, Connecticut is an idea fun factory for the financial-services industry.

More than 2,000 executives, from firms such as Bank of America, Citigroup, and Deutsche Bank, have toured the Merlin Center in search of a few new ideas about strategy, technology, and customer service. The mind-set behind the magic: The best way to prepare for the future in a fast-changing industry is to see it come to life before your eyes.

"Our goal is to change the nature of retail banking," says Bob Steele, the facility's resident Wonka. "Banks need to think of themselves as purveyors of customer experiences, and they need to master cross-channel distribution -- the integration of clicks and bricks. The experience has to be superlative, whether it takes place inside a bank branch, at an ATM, on the phone, or on the Web."

Visitors enter the Merlin Center through a bright-red, megaphone-shaped portal and immediately find themselves in a darkened conference room. After a brief multimedia presentation by Steele (which features disconcerting quotes like "There is no place in the future for a bank, in the traditional sense of the word"), the back wall of the conference room rises like a curtain, and Steele leads the way onto a set of a city street.

The street represents a single-minded view of the world: Every establishment on either side of it has something to do with money. There's a 6,500-square-foot megabank branch with a towering glass facade, a boutique brokerage banded by a colorful stock ticker, a drive-thru teller, and a smaller bank branch. Most of the light illuminating the street comes from shimmering plasma displays inside the buildings and from projections of promotional ads on the closed blinds of a store window. Occasionally, there's a whooshing sound as a canister shoots through a network of vacuum tubes.

It is a thoroughly overstimulating environment, and that's intentional: The Merlin Center is designed to push bankers to venture beyond their traditional intellectual boundaries. "It has only recently dawned on banks that they're in the retail business," says Steele, whose official title is managing director of the Merlin Center. "We want to make them retailers on the same level as Home Depot or IKEA."

The Merlin Center opened in 1995 as an R&D operation for the John Ryan Co., a Minneapolis-based consulting firm that works with banks on retailing strategies. Steele says that the firm has spent a total of $15 million to develop and maintain the center since its inception. There is a payoff, though: Since the center was built, the John Ryan Co.'s consulting business has tripled, and it has acquired a reputation as a thought leader in the financial-services sector.

As with any decent theme park, the Merlin Center experience is based on a fictional story line: First Traditional Bank & Trust has made the decision to adopt an aggressive open-finance strategy, offering an array of financial services from a variety of different providers. "We decided to portray open finance because it's the scariest and most challenging course for banks," Steele explains. "It means that many of their products have been commoditized, and they're forced to compete on service and customer experience in addition to price."

The first stop on the tour is the flagship branch of Open Financial Network -- First Traditional's new identity. In the center of the branch, there's a circular "core" for customers who want to conduct quick transactions. There are familiar-looking ATMs (albeit with screens that display full-motion video) alongside remote video tellers, where customers can interact with a live teller working away from the floor in a secure cash room. Checks and cash fly overhead through pneumatic tubes. "If you don't have any cash on the floor, that makes it much less appealing for someone to rob the bank," Steele explains.

All of the kiosks in the branch are designed to aid in the transition to online banking. The computers that customers use to set up a checking account, for example, have the same interface that they would use at home to check their balances, deposits, and other transactions.

Elsewhere there's a seminar room where experts videoconference with customers on topics like e-commerce for small business, fiscal fitness for women, and saving for college. Another area, called "openware," sells the top ten books and software packages on investing.

Bankers who visit the Merlin Center aren't put through any sort of brainstorming exercises. Steele says that their wheels usually start turning the moment they step onto the street. "You'll have the marketing guy say, 'Could we do something like this?' And the IT guy will say, 'Absolutely not.' Then the marketing guy will say, 'Why not?' And the IT guy will say, 'Well, I guess we could if we changed the way we do a few things.' Our goal is to show them what's coming -- what the technology is making not just possible, but inevitable. There's always a reaction."