This year, in-branch transactions are down again as more customers are switching to electronic channels for their routine transactions. This will escalate as some banks introduce in-branch fees for certain transactions.

This trend bore out in our most recent Bank Performance Study in a way that was not surprising. In high-performing banks, the transactions per teller per month actually decreased by 7% over the past two years. The interesting comparison is that in average banks, the transactions per teller per month decreased by 21%. What is rather startling is that the average banks in our study had a reduction in transactions per deposit account of 14%, while the top-quartile banks' reduction in the same metric was 28%. The gap in performance between top-tier banks and average banks in our study shifted from a 7% gap in 2009 to a 21% gap in 2010. The lesson in this is that the retail operations of the average banks did not respond to the shift in consumer behavior, while top-performing banks managed through it. The question is whether the average banks did not respond to known data or did not measure it as a strategically important metric.

The latest Nielsen data and estimates show that there will be more than 142 million Smartphones in use in the United States at the end of 2011, up from 12.5 million in 2008. Retail bankers should be paying attention to this industry metric. If they don't, they might find that their infrastructure does not support the new consumer reality. Customers will be using their Smartphones, pads, and computers to handle routine transfers of funds and payments at an ever-increasing rate, with estimates that over 50% of transactions will be executed in this way by 2015 in the United States.

The strategic importance of key behavioral trends should shape the technological and service models we build, ushering our customers into the electronic age. This is already how things are done in Europe, where checks are a distant memory. What analytics does your bank use to monitor customer behaviors and the shifts that are taking place? Are you channel-sensitive, or do you manage each channel as a separate silo? Measures and analytics are the intelligence that you will require as we trend to the new banking reality.