Hydrogen Advertising Bank-Industry Survey Reveals Majority of Pacific Northwest Businesses Distrust Banks

The financial meltdown is having lingering affects for Northwest businesses, including an overwhelming opinion – 82 percent – that businesses will “never trust financial institutions in the same way they did” prior to the 2008 financial crisis. This sentiment and other insights were discovered though a survey of senior Pacific Northwest executives responsible for business-banking decisions, conducted by Hydrogen Advertising of Seattle.

Other key findings include:

A high number of Northwest business executives feel they are currently working with the wrong bank – only seven percent of respondents strongly agreed they were working with “the best possible bank for their business needs.”
Despite a sense of being with the wrong bank, businesses don’t frequently switch banks – 55 percent of businesses have not changed banking partners in the past five years.
An overwhelming majority of respondents were “not familiar at all” with a selection of regional banking brands Hydrogen Advertising highlighted in the survey.
75 percent of business leaders agreed that the “services and products of most banks are about the same.”
Of the various commercial banking services assessed in the survey, businesses were most interested in banks providing a real person to answer phone calls instead of an automated system.
43 percent of businesses expressed that the ideal banking partner would have a dedicated representative assigned to their account.
While many executives expressed an interest in partnering with a different financial institution, 63 percent of businesses have stayed with their current bank because of the “difficulties of switching banks.”
There is ambivalence about the direction of the economy over the next 12 months with 62 percent of business leaders stating the economy will either “improve somewhat” or “remain about the same.”
On a more positive note, zero percent of respondents were extremely fearful that their current banking partners were in jeopardy of “not being around for the long term.”

Hydrogen Advertising’s analysis of survey data indicates that national and regional banks in the Pacific Northwest are in the predicament of being less trusted than before and providers of undifferentiated products and services. While rates were certainly a consideration in choosing a bank, service-oriented and problem-solving offerings were more critical factors in differentiating banks in the eyes of business customers. Finally, regional banks may not be hemorrhaging customers, but this may be due to the fact most businesses consider the bank-switching-process as too arduous to be worth the effort.

“Regional business customers have, at worst, become increasingly distrustful of banks and, at best, are very ambivalent about banking partners, big or small,” said Rick Peterson, president, Hydrogen Advertising. “We view this predicament as an opportunity for forward-thinking regional banks to highlight their value-added service offerings, and to educate businesses that they do more than offer competitive rates – they understand their customers and function as in-the-trenches partners.”

The survey, conducted in June and July of 2011, was designed to mirror business size and number of employee trends in the Pacific Northwest. All survey respondents were senior executives responsible for banking decisions within their companies, across multiple industries located in Oregon, Idaho and Washington state.