Not a single standardised target Depending on their positions and functions, the people responsible of a bank’s management, either at the head-office or at a branch level, have different objectives. They have various needs of monitoring and request customised tools to exert this monitoring.
Necessity of a comprehensive and logical framework To be efficient, the implementation of a new strategy has to be done in a framework detailing all the aspects of the monitoring. This framework is defined by the head-office, which then has to ensure that it is correctly used by the branches and the support functions.
Importance of the issue The issue raised is that is not linked to the physical safety, for instance of a building. The purpose is to address the question of the financial safety of the operations managed by the branch network.
General understanding Customer satisfaction, as such, should be part of an efficient branch management, and it ha to be measured and monitored. The question then is to find how to do it. There are several available tools.
General understanding The banking activity, especially at branch level, can be considered as an industrial process in the same way as for any type of economic activity.
A growing concern If profitability is the natural target of any type of private business, the top management of a bank may also be sensitive to other achievements, such as a local service to clients or to State companies.
A combined perspective The main business areas (customers, products and others) are studied one by one, as a first level of performance indicators.
A wide range of standards The management of a bank, as a consequence of its strategy, is interested to establish a set of standards or benchmarks. By nature, this set covers a wide range of topics.
Exercise 1 The purpose of the exercise is to have the participants thinking by themselves about a possible action plan (or some possible action plans) in two cases, which are to be used all along the various modules.
An on-going process The control and monitoring process is a permanent and crucial one. Planning the development of a new strategy could be useless without a control of the follow-up and an adequate reporting of the work in progress. The monitoring has to be clearly organised, in terms of people and systems.
