Don’t be surprised to see sweater-vested Midwest Heritage Bank employees sacking groceries or directing customers to the frozen peas at the new Hy-Vee supermarket when it opens later this month in West Des Moines.

“With the technology we’ve got in place, we’ll be free to let some of our employees stroll through the store and help customers,” said Michael Cruzen, the bank’s executive vice president and chief operations officer.

That technology, which allows for an open design in which customers can come around a rounded counter to stand next to the teller, includes a “cash recycling” machine that eliminates the need for a conventional teller’s window and cash drawer. The machine keeps a tight rein on cash, dispensing exact amounts for each withdrawal, as well as automatically sorting and counting deposited cash, coins or checks.

“With this branch, there are no teller lines, so we’ve dropped the boundaries and invited them into the branch,” Cruzen said. “We’ll invite you to look at the screen. And from a privacy standpoint we’ll point to the screen, rather than say, ‘You wrote a check for $255 and that’s what overdrew your account.’”

Midwest Heritage, which is owned by West Des Moines-based Hy-Vee Inc., will also implement a paperless account system that will allow customers to open an account by signing an electronic signature pad and scanning their driver’s license for identification, rather than filling out paper documents. The system will also eliminate early cutoff times for deposits, meaning deposits received up until the branch’s 7 p.m. closing time will be instantly credited to customers’ accounts.

Midwest Heritage isn’t the only Greater Des Moines financial institution that’s taking a more retail-oriented approach. At Bank Iowa’s Jordan Creek branch, customers enjoy a fully equipped coffee bar that doubles as the check-writing station.

“You want to put it in a place that’s very accessible and integral to the lobby,” said Rob Smith, a principal at Architects Smith Metzger, which designed that branch. “At Bank Iowa, we put it near the teller line. We made it like the milk at the grocery store so that (customers) go past a lot of (bank employees) to be greeted.

“At the same time, you don’t want it to be a ‘fishbowl,’” he said. “You still want to define it some so that it feels like a comfortable place. For instance, people don’t want people walking around behind them, so you put couches against the walls.”

For Smith, who has been designing banks for the past 20 years, the move toward more customer-centered bank offices has been an evolutionary process that will continue, he said. The changes range from the aesthetic to the practical.

“I’m remodeling a bank in Fairfield right now that has so much wood paneling it looks like a country club,” said Smith, who said banks are increasingly using glass partitions to brighten the spaces and more flexible furniture to accommodate electronic workstations. Additionally, banks have been moving toward installing fewer teller windows.

“The classic teller line is another kind of a ‘doctor office’ situation,” Smith said. “We’re telling you, ‘You are the customer, you stand over there,’ and we reach over this three-foot counter to do business.”

Though some banks are reducing or even eliminating teller windows in their designs, “it’s not a slam dunk to convince (bankers) they should do it another way,” he said. “I think the biggest teller line remodeling we ever did was going from 15 windows to five, and I’m thinking, ‘Three’s plenty.’ To go from that to a stand-up cash-dispensing machine is one option, but not all the banks are going to go to those, just because it’s such a new idea.”

Randy Bray, a bank design consultant with Ladco Development Co. in West Des Moines, has partnered with a number of architectural firms, both locally and nationally, to assist financial institutions in creating more inviting branches for their customers.

Bray, who during 30-plus years as a banker served as the chief executive of three banks and chairman of a fourth, became interested in design while he was CEO of Midland Savings Bank in Des Moines. To find new ideas for several new offices his bank was planning in the early 1990s, he visited banks in a number of large cities throughout the United States.

“As I was visiting all of those branches, the one word that kept coming to mind was ‘intimidating.’” he said. “When I walked into particularly large banks, the first person who greeted me was a security guard, not a concierge or a customer service person. In addition to that, as I looked around and saw the big marble columns and marble walls and could hear voices bouncing off those, it just occurred to me that we, including our own bank, had not created a very friendly environment for people to come into.”

At the same time, he noticed the welcoming feeling he got when entering hotels and department stores, particularly Nordstrom’s.

“I came back to the bank and said, ‘I wonder why we can’t be more like Nordstrom’s?’ We ended up hiring the architecture firm that has done every Nordstrom’s store that’s ever been done – Callison Architecture, which is the largest retail architectural firm in the world.

“What we tried to do (at Midland), as with any retailer, was to really orchestrate the entire customer experience,” Bray said. “What’s the impression they have when they walk in the door; what kind of emotions does it create for them?

“Then we tried to direct them in the direction we wanted them to go. At Nordstrom’s, it’s the white shirts on the back wall. Rather than just creating a transaction, we were creating an experience for the customer. In those particular offices at that time, we put in a concierge to direct the customer and get them to the right people and to do some minor transactions for them.”

Like retailers, banks also need to focus on how they can create more foot traffic in the branch, Bray said. “How do we get more customers to come in, how do we increase sales per square foot, and how do we think more like retailers to have customers to buy more things when they’re at that office?”

Last year Bray advised a bank in Bloomington, Ill., that was planning to build a branch near a major intersection that was just beginning to be developed.

“Our advice to them was, ‘People are going to just go right by it, because banking is a convenience transaction,’” he said. “‘If you can put something else there that will make people stop there, then you have an opportunity to capture the market early, and to reduce your real estate costs by providing some other services.’”

For that project, the bank sought out a coffeehouse and a laundry/dry cleaning service as tenants and joined the three businesses together with a common lobby area. Besides helping to increase business for each company, the arrangement reduced the bank’s real estate costs by allowing it to collect rent on a portion of the space. The concept was recognized last year by Independent Banker magazine as one of five innovative bank design projects.

Bray is currently working with five Central Iowa banks, three of which are now under construction, to incorporate some of these same innovations into their new branches. Bray said he could not disclose which institutions he’s working with because none have yet announced their expansion plans.

Midwest Heritage President and CEO Dick Stoffer said his bank, which with its newest branch will have seven in-store offices, hopes to open smaller versions of the open branch design at other Hy-Vee stores in Central Iowa. The bank plans to evaluate its staffing needs with its new cash recycling machine for about the next six months, he said.

“That’s where we’re really going to gain the efficiencies, with the staffing,” Stoffer said.

“We’re looking at possibly even doing some mini-branches, where it may be just this machine and another person,” he said. “That’s still on the drawing board. In another store location where we don’t have this size footprint we can work out of, it may just be a smaller kiosk. … I’m sure there’s going to be a hiccup or two along the way, but we’ll adjust the sails and trim it and make sure we’re moving in the right direction and gain the speed and efficiency we’ll need.”