Pretty cool for a bank

I have to say it. Almost without exception (Grameenbank being an exception), all banks suck.

First Direct was a UK exception (up to a point), but seems to have stopped developing and started slipping back into deploying traditional banking techniques.

But this bank doesn’t suck: I first heard of South Umpqua Bank from Jerry Fritz of the University of Madison-Wisconsin five years or so ago. Now, as ‘Umpqua Bank’ (there never was a ‘North Umpqua Bank’), it is possibly the coolest thing to come out of the US Northwest since Nirvana.

There’s a book that explains how they did it. It’s mentioned over in my Leadership blog.

Tags: banking, banks, Customer Service, design, growth

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