Stephen Greer, a senior analyst at Celent, pointed to a program from Barclays called the Digital Eagles.
These particular employees are “passionate about empowering our colleagues, customers and local communities to be more confident with technology and to move forward in the digital world,” according to the Barclays’ website.
Greer also referenced BofA’s marketing efforts around mobile banking, which OceanFirst studied. “Barclays and Bank of America have generally led the pack as far as mobile adoption is concerned, and they have fairly strong active user rates,” he said.
Among community and regional banks, Greer cited Umpqua Holdings' recent efforts to build what it calls the “human-digital” banking experience. The Portland, Ore., company in 2017 embarked on a strategy to use technology to personalize banking.
“It seems to me like this is a bigger trend where you're seeing institutions, with their branch personnel, try to empower them to do more and fulfill more needs,” Greer said.
If OceanFirst “is going to be focused more on mobile for the time being and training them to be able to speak to digital banking more formally, in the future you can imagine where they would empower that staff to do more advisory functions for more critical banking needs,” Greer added.