Conclusion: Synergistic Banking

This book has identified a number of opportunities for organizations engaged in providing retail banking services to prepare for the future. The future is not about doing any one specific thing; rather it is about doing many things right at varying times. The challenge for retail bankers is to balance continually the resources of the firm with the opportunities presented by the marketplace. From a theoretical perspective, resource balancing sounds easy. However, in reality, maintaining a judicious balance is extremely difficult, not because resources are limited, but because market conditions are changing at a dynamic rate, which means that sometimes products must be abandoned before their full return on investment is realized. These conditions create a new problem for bankers, that is, to understand the relationship between the product’s life cycle and the waxing and waning of consumer and SME demand.