Brand Refresh and Recapitalization for Bank Franchise

Our client, a regional retail bank with franchise offices in California and Florida, faced a huge setback when they fell out of compliance on meeting capital ratio requirements. They were able to execute one of the industry’s largest capital raises in the amount of $451 million.

The client was in need of a total brand refresh in order to achieve a 15% return on investment for investors. The bank needed to significantly increase its consumer deposit transactions to reduce its reliance on wholesale borrowing from capital markets. In addition, they needed to devise a strategy to increase their consumer interest income in order to tackle the interest they were paying on borrowed funds.

Our analysis determined that consumer awareness for the client’s brand was below two percent. Essentially, consumers thought the bank had been closed. Our approach was twofold.  First, differentiate our client from other banks. Second, revive the brand and immediately drive consumer deposit, transaction, and lending business into the bank, organically.

We started by turning the branch and loan officer sales forces into an aggressive customer-driven, retail-sales, oriented team. We hosted a six-month sales and service training boot camp for bank associates designed to ensure that the consumer experience exceeded customer expectation at every delivery touch point on the frontline and in the back office.

Once the new sales and service culture was in place we assisted the client in developing the most aggressive integrated marketing strategy in banking history by targeting clients at top-tier commercial banks in California and Florida—Bank of America, Wells Fargo, First Interstate, and Barnett Bank.

We were able to increase consumer brand awareness from 2% to 19% in less than 13 months. Within 24 months, the bank was successfully delivering a 15% return on investment to shareholders while increasing the share price from $1.50 per share to $19.00 per share during the merger with CalFed.

The marketing campaign added new checking accounts at the rate of 10,000 a month. Our client increased its checking account portfolio by 30% over a 24 month period totaling $1 billion in overall deposits. This increase allowed our client to reduce its reliance on wholesale borrowing from capital markets from 47% to 33%.