Commerce Bank

Executive summary

Commerce Bank offers deposits and loan services to customers in three Eastern states of the country. The bank has undertaken a customer focused approach towards delivering banking service to its clients. For that purpose the bank has adopted the practices of the retail industry towards imparting an atypical experience quite uncommon in the banking industry. Besides, the bank has used leaders in the retail industry as a benchmark to measure its performance. Despite having an impressive growth of twenty-fold increase in its share value, high customer visit to its branches, high levels of positive feedback from customers, the bank has to prepare itself about the sustainability of its practices in a highly competitive financial market. The analysis based on the date provided in the case study recommends the bank to expand customer base by exploring new geographical regions; undertake cross-training of employees and provide freebees doing off-peak hours to manage traffic; and conduct SERVQUAL analysis and hire third party mystery shoppers to objectively evaluate bank employees’ performance.

Background

Commerce bank (hereafter C.B.) began operations in 1973 as a community bank in southern New Jersey and currently spread across Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New York. C.B. attained break-even in less than two years. Although its share prices are the higher than other in the banking sector its stock prices have shown an impressive growth of twenty fold. C.B. offers checking and deposit services to clients. The checking products available are: standard checking, interest checking, 50 plus club, and consumer checking. Except for the last product all three charged no monthly fee. Besides it also offered ATM services and allowed VISA transactions for payments.

Many factors can be held accountable for the phenomenal success of steady growth for banking retailer. To begin with, first, the bank adopted an approach of exceeding...