Teaming with possibilities.

• Author: Bernstel, Janet Bigham
• Position: Cover Story

In today's competitive banking world, some financial institutions are reorganizing into interdepartmental, cross-functional teams to better collaborate in serving--and selling to--the customer. Here's what these banks are doing and how they are benefiting.

Olympic medalist and boxer George Foreman may be right when he said, "A hero is someone who doesn't change." But in today's business world, a company must change or it will perish. Nowhere is that so evident as in the financial services industry, where deregulation has redefined banking. With the modernization fully underway, bank managers are stuggling to integrate people, divisions and philosophies.

"Banks grew up being functionally organized, very sioed," explains Lance Kessler of Lance Kessler & Associates of Mechanicsburg, Pa. "If I did retail banking, I worked in the branch environment. If I worked in trust, that was my world. But with a converging industry, what used to be banking looks very, very different. And banks are all trying to figure out divisional integration."

That integration, says Kessler, requires incredible teamwork--cross-functional teamwork, to be exact. No individual heroes here, but rather, a collection of bank employees with different backgrounds, perspectives and views when they look at customer information. A bank with four branches, for example, would construct a team with the four branch managers-also someone with investment expertise, trust expertise, small-business expertise and a person who sells insurance in that geographical market.

"The power of cross-functional teams is amazing," claims Kessler. "Take someone from small business-they can see far more opportunities in small business than anyone, but they won't see any trust opportunities. So together, the team is truly looking holistically at the customer."

Repositioning Strategy

One southeastern Pennsylvania bank learned the power of teams early on when it began an institutional makeover in 1999. That's the year the Univest Corp., Souderton, Pa., embarked on a five-year repositioning plan in an effort to remain the financial institution of choice for its customers.

"Univest actually changed status from a bank holding company to a financial services holding company," explains Linda Bishop, director of sales and marketing for Univest Corp. "We acquired a broker-dealer and two insurance agencies upon recognizing that the future of banking is going to depend on more than just the margins on loans and deposits."

With $1 billion in total assets and a 125-year history serving the communities of Montgomery and Bucks counties, Pennsylvania, Univest decided it needed to become more than a bank. In fact, the corporation's whole branding initiative is based on that tagline: "Univest-more than a bank. Financial solutions for life."

To reposition itself, the company first had to reposition the mindset of the bank staff. Univest enlisted the help of consultant Kessler, who introduced the idea of reorganizing along the lines of customer segments, rather than in the traditional functional silos.

Building the team

Beginning with Kessler's "participatory marketing planning" business model, Univest brought together two cross-functional teams: a business-segment and a consumer-segment planning group. Each team of 12 looked at specific customer segments and developed sales plans on how to approach these customers and meet their needs.

"The approach was great," says Bishop. "The planning groups actually helped write the marketing plan saying 'These are initiatives we're going to do.' It was not 'We've got a corporate banking marketing plan, and how are we going to generate more loans and deposits?"'

The staff also had to learn how to function as a team by selling in an integrated way, not just in a way that promoted their own departmental product. That can be tough to do with employees mired in a silo-focus culture. Kessler cites one bank president (at another institution) who actually brought in an industrial psychologist to turn around the employee mindset. "They didn't integrate well when it was cross-functional because they thought silo-functional," he says. "The president brought in the psychologist because he wanted to give them skills and appreciation for what...