“JPMorgan’s banks of the future will fundamentally upend Americans’ relationship with banking,” writes The New York Times (April 2, 2014). They will offer more services for customers in far less space. The layout of the new banks has gained urgency across the industry as a growing number of customers use mobile technologies to conduct many traditional banking functions, like check deposits and paying bills, without ever stepping into a branch. Either the bank branches adapt or they go the way of video stores.

JPMorgan is not the only institution trying to reimagine the traditional bank branch with its long rows of tellers standing behind glass. Across Wall Street, banks are looking to slash expenses and wring more profit from retail banking. Banking giants like Bank of America and Citigroup are working to overhaul branches with the goal of more closely resembling an Apple store, where employees holding tablets and other high-tech gadgets tend to customers.

Last year, Wells Fargo opened a 1,200-square-foot “minibranch” in Washington. JPMorgan, whose legacy bank branches averaged about 4,400 square feet several years ago, has already slimmed them down to 2,500 to 3,500 square feet. That firm began by convening focus groups to determine what customers wanted. The findings: space and simplicity.

Within the new branches, the teller line is no longer the centerpiece. That has been moved to the side. The focal point is now occupied by express banking kiosks, a kind of souped-up A.T.M. Aside from their new look, the machines allow more customized transactions. Customers can, for example, opt to get cash in any amount and any denomination, not just in $20 bills or $50 bills. The new machines are safer, too. Unlike traditional A.T.M.s that must be restocked with cash, these units replenish their own supplies from deposits, cutting down on the amount of times that employees have to ferry money to the vaults

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.

SINCE the 1970s, paying with plastic has been pretty standard everywhere: Customers swiped their cards, signed receipts and took home their purchases. But after security breaches at Target last year led to the loss of personal data from as many as 110 million customers, the financial industry is racing to adopt technologies that will alter that decades-old ritual. To many, it is about time. The roots of the magnetic strip on credit cards extend back to World War II, ample time for thieves to learn to hack and steal those black lines of account information.

Credit card fraud totaled $5.3 billion in the U.S. alone in 2012, reports The New York Times (April 2, 2014), giving the industry plenty of incentive to devise a better system. The amount lost to fraud continues to grow 30-50% a year. Europe and parts of Asia have already used the system for the better part of a decade, while American merchants and issuers have balked, largely because of cost. Chip-equipped cards (called “E.M.V.” technology for “Europay, MasterCard, VISA”) cost $1.30 each to make, while a standard plastic card with a magnetic stripe on the back costs 10 cents. Retailers, too, have been loath to update their systems to accept chip technology because of the added cost.

“E.M.V. is going to cost billions of dollars to implement in this country,” says one analyst. But the system works. In 2005, when Britain fully phased in the E.M.V. technology, credit counterfeit card fraud was 25%; such fraud plummeted to 11% seven years later.

Visa, MasterCard and American Express all recently announced road maps for adopting smart chips, with the aim of forcing retailers and issuers to put E.M.V. in place by October 2015 in the U.S. By then, the liability for any counterfeit fraud will fall on whoever has not adopted the chip technology. From 17 million to 20 million chip cards have been issued in the U.S. But that represents just 2% of the 1 billion cards in use.

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.