Key Bank - 650 branch (slow) rollout

Sorting through the inbox this weekend, we noticed that Diebold have quietly announced a substantial rollout at KeyBank (long rumored), starting with 8 of the bank's recently refurbished upstate-New York branches. The rollout, which is slated to address ~650 of the bank's 950 branches over the course of three years, is part of a broader upgrade of the bank's customer-facing electronic interfaces--including large-scale electronic displays behind the teller counter (visible displaying Key's logo, above), enhanced ATMs, and self-service deposit machines.

According to the press release, the core objective of the program is to migrate customers to more self-directed service options, freeing up branch staff to provide more in-depth assistance on more complex, consultative issues, and ultimately reducing transaction-driven branch traffic.

Once deployed, much of the content on the screens will be centrally developed and directed, but each branch will also have the flexibility to program its own community content (e.g. uploading images from community events) and provide customized local offers. Content will be delivered over the bank's existing network infrastructure, and managed using software provided by Diebold. Ostensibly, content will also be delivered to the ATM screens, where offers can be customized using the bank's CRM data.

This is one of only a few cases we are aware of where an ATM provider such as Diebold is also providing digital signage infrastructure and software, but it would seem to us to be a logical extension of the existing service agreements such companies provide.

Bank of America - Collated Pilots & Rollouts

With nearly 6,000 locations, Bank of America possesses by far the largest retail network of any US retail bank. While the bank, which prides itself on technological innovation, has been making waves in the digital signage industry for years now--including this 2004 article in Business Week, which many at the time believed (incorrectly, it turns out) was the bellwhether moment for the digital signage industry--but has yet to make any large-scale commitment to date.


That said, over the past 2-3 years a number of "small scale" rollouts have occurred among within the bank's network (the largest of which was inherited in the acquisition of FleetBoston), and many of these would dwarf a full rollout for almost any other client. The bank is notoriously tight-lipped about results from any of its pilot tests, but rumor has it that customer satisfaction improved dramatically in RBSi branches, where Teller Zone Media was originally tested, and that branches with the interactive mortgage fixtures witnessed a 10-15% increase in applications during a limiting pilot test (if that's true, it's shocking the bank didn't deploy those babies everywhere, as 6-12 additional mortgage sales per year would easily cover the cost of ownership).

Rather than detail them individually over time, I have attempted to provide a comprehensive list below:

• Teller Zone Media (400-500 sites) - 19"-42" screens located above or behind teller counters, displaying live news feeds interspersed with bank content, primarily in New York, Washington, DC, and in denovo (RBSi) locations from the past 3-4 years
• Lobby/Media Wall (300-400 sites) - a 42" screen located in the waiting area of denovo (RBSi) branches, playing the same mix of news and bank content as the teller area
• External LED Signage (<10>sites))- massive LED banners and walls serving as external signage, primarily in high-visibility locations in New York
• Digital Windows (10-20 sites?) - 19"-60" Screens located in windows of high-traffic New York locations, some in 'portrait' mode and some in 'landscape' mode, primarily playing the same news/content mix as the interior screens (where they're even working these days)
• Investor Centers (40-50 sites) - 1-2 42" screens located in the Banc of America Securities offices, mostly in California and Texas, showing financial news almost exclusively
• ATM Vestibule (~50 sites) - primarily small screens in New York branches, frequently incorporated into the ATM surround itself
• Interactive Web Kiosks (~300 sites?) - all over in New York, DC, and Boston (although rarely being used and with less pomp than those displayed in the photo below), touchscreen kiosks enabling customers to access account information, print out information, and use various "tools" available on the Bank of America homepage
• Interactive Mortgage Centers (15-20 sites) - a very cool application, which since may have been de-installed, the interactive versions of the ubiquitous "Mortgage Center" fixtures allowed customers to learn about mortgage products or watch informational videos, and were located primarily in Las Vegas and Florida
• Interactive Window (1 site) - an ersewhile pilot test in Chicago, probably designed to generate buzz (which it did: link), which played primarily the same content used on the mortgage fixtures

As you would imagine, this many projects takes a small village of suppliers to manage and complete, including Prism Technologies, Creative Realities, Planar/CoolSign, R/GA, GestureTek, Convergent, and Sony, among others I'm sure.

Bank of New York - Park Avenue Flagship

Another 3-wide LCD digital signage banner installation, this time in the ATM vestibule at Bank of New York's flagship Park Avenue location. B0NY's 400+ retail branches were recently acquired by JP Morgan Chase and are in the process of being re-branded, but this branch (a one-off in the BoNY network) should fit nicely with the ones Chase has been building or renovating elsewhere in the city.

To be honest, I'm not sure what the architect's or marketer's intent was with this sign originally, as it's positioned well to be visible from the street--where employing need some sort of short flashy 'attract' sequence with 3-5 second content bursts would make the most sense--yet too high to be seen as you wait to use the ATM, where devoting 45 minutes or so of every hour to talking-head style Bloomberg financial news (does anyone other than a banker, stock analyst, broker, or trader actually choose to watch that on their free time? Granted, those guys were probably BoNY's target market) might otherwise make a modicum of sense.

The screen is broken up into multiple quadrants, one showing a live Bloomberg feed, one a ticker, one a separate text-based news panel, and one with an ad, but cuts to Bank of New York advertising whenever the telecast cuts to a commercial break. This solves one major problem faced by the myrriad of banks here in New York who have installed televisions in their denovo branches, only to broadcast thousands of their competitors' ads to their own customers as they wait for service (read: dumb). I'm assuming that Chase, who I'll profile at some point in the future, has since replaced this feed with the same content they run in their own legacy branches, but I'm guessing content/software was originally provided by Bloomberg Financial Network and The Affinity Group.