Retail Banking Strategies

I went to my mother-in-law’s branch of Union Bank of California yesterday and was surprised to find newly installed mantraps. While these are common in Europe and Asia, they aren’t seen very often in US banks. But with the rise of bank robberies — and especially violent takeovers — more banks are installing them. Union Bank staff told me they would be placed in at least four San Diego area branches, and possibly many more.

If you’re not familiar with mantraps, or “entrance control systems”, the basic concept is that you walk into a small vestibule, stop until the door locks behind you, then wait until the door to the bank is unlocked. In the Union Bank version (from Hamilton Safe), there is a metal detector and motion detector. If more than one person enters, or if metal is detected, then the doors stay locked until bank staff buzzes you in.

My wife set off the metal detector and was locked into the bullet-proof glass enclosed vestibule until she pulled her cell phone and keys from her purse, and demonstrated to the satisfaction of the branch staff that she wasn’t packin’ heat.

Exiting the bank you go through the same process but without the metal detector. There is a great “stupid bank robber” story from Pittsburgh where a guy attempted to exit a Citizens Bank branch after passing a note to a teller demanding cash. He got through the first door, but found himself locked in the bullet-proof glass vestibule when the teller pressed a security button. The police arrived to find “bank robber under glass”.

My first reaction on hearing about these was it would make the branch feel less convenient — here we are, trying to get more customers to interact with branch staff and you have to go through airline type frisking before you can even get in the teller line. I visited Union Bank to try the system out, and it really worked quite smoothly. Once you got the hang of it (and as long as you weren’t carrying too much metal) you could go through the double doors fairly quickly. Of course this system would be quite problematic in larger urban branches with heavy traffic. It’s really made for smaller branches, where you can go through one at a time in a fairly paced manner.

Maybe it’s just an unfortunate sign of the times. Bank robberies are up. Violent robberies — gangs taking over a whole branch with weapons drawn — are becoming more prevalent. And that apparently was the trigger for Union Bank biting the bullet and installing these systems. But there does seem something sad about having to install mantraps (or in my wife’s case, womantraps) in your typical suburban bank branch in front of the supermarket.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Branch Distribution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.