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Deconstructing the bank?

I know I had promised a blog about the executive summary and the all important appendixes, but I thought I would interject with a kind of concept map about “The Bank” (Canadian financial services companies). I wanted to suggest a way to think about them; to peel back the layers and perhaps help you find a place to start or to anchor your workforce/workplace innovation.

So what is a bank? In Canada, the banks are relatively large (RBC has around 80000 employees, most of them in Canada!). Brokerages and wealth management providers can be any size. I just want to focus you on the big banks for now.

Within each bank you will have organizations in each area to rival size and scope of any company in that specific field or industry. You can research and dig into the specific models or the areas of practice/lines of business, but to give you a glimpse, a bank can be:

- a retail organization to handle the day to day banking services and all the physical structures that support it
- a business banking company almost large enough to be a bank on it’s own, and commercial banking on top of that
- a wealth management and investing arm also large enough to be it’s own bank
- a training organization as large as any in Canada
- a huge law firm to handle all the legal needs of the different lines of business; internal and external facing
- research and archive groups to rival most universities
- a distribution system as large as any major retailer
- a real estate division managing bricks and mortar across hundred is not thousands of locations
- marketing groups for every line of business, most demographics and sometimes even specific products, often including media and production services
- not to mention groups for partnerships like credit card offerings, processing and inter bank services
- a communications “firm” that can handle all the communications work large and small, inbound and out, public and investor
- a huge accounting arm able to keep track of it all
- head office and management services to keep it all on track
- an HR organization to serve this many employees, retain talent and attract the next generation of the workforce
- a full service technology company with the ability to manage and develop any type of technology, with someone in almost every technology roll you can imagine
- security and anti fraud groups to keep operations safe and sound
- the executive teams and the services like strategy and internal consultants that support them as they steer the enterprise

These workplaces all exist in a bank; a service provider, a massive tech company, a huge management and consulting company, a communications firm, a law firm and more all rolled into one. A lot of us work in many of those areas at the same time, or cross form workplace to workplace thorugh our career. Any one of those areas of work could be a great place to change the workplace or the way we work. All of them face the issues and the opportunities of the workplace of the future.

Which will you transform?

Posted by Tim on November 23, 2009 7:12 AM

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