The Problem with Historical Performance – Pitney Bowes MapInfo publishes White Paper on setting goals for retail bank branch sales

Location intelligent approach to goal setting reaps valuable results for retail banking in a changing climate

Windsor, 24 June 2008 – Pitney Bowes MapInfo, the leading global provider of location intelligence solutions, is today publishing a new White Paper for the retail banking industry, which argues that setting location-related branch goals is a vital component of a successful sales management process for retail banking.

Written by Bill Simmons, Director, Finance Services Practice at Pitney Bowes MapInfo, The Problem with Historical Performance delivers an incisive insight into how measuring the true opportunity of an individual branch is essential to effective goal setting.  The paper analyses recent research conducted by Pitney Bowes MapInfo of 750 branch offices across five regional banks in the US, to demonstrate how traditional methods of goal setting fall wide of the mark in a perpetually changing market and how this can also apply to a UK market.

“If you take a three-year period, there are some key variables related to branch location that have to be taken into account for effective goal setting,” said Bill Simmons.

“Just because a branch may have consistently increased sales by 10% for each of the past three years is not an indication that the branch can continue at that pace.  The market changes, competition changes and any number of other factors will affective a branch’s ability to generate increasing sales.”

Using detailed findings from the research, the White Paper presents a compelling case for opportunity-based goal setting, which accounts for the factors that affect branch performance worldwide but are outside its control.  This process also creates viable benchmarking metrics, which can be used to measure household penetration, untapped cross-sell potential, attrition and average balances.

When viewed across products, each branch can be placed along a series of performance metrics indicating whether it is performing poorly compared to branches in similar situations, or whether it is close to being “best-in-class” in real terms.

The Problem with Historical Performance is now available free to download at: www.mapinfo.co.uk/whereinretailbanking