Richard P. Fenuccio and Kurt E. Raber
Title: Partner, President; Partner, Vice President, Brown Lindquist Fenuccio & Raber
Architects Inc.
Age: 51; 46
Experience: 30 years; more than 25 years
Kurt Raber and Richard Fenuccio were both destined for architecture from an early age, but it wasn’t until 2000, when their respective firms merged, that they joined forces. While their business is a healthy mix of commercial and residential work, a good deal of their commercial work focuses on designing bank branches.
Q: So your bank branch work has been exclusively with community banks here on the Cape, correct?
A: Fenuccio: Yes, it’s our wheelhouse. It’s where our business is located, and it all boils down to doing something that is consistent with the bank’s mission. We treat each bank’s design work very differently. They each have very different attitudes and approaches.
I think that’s what we enjoy about our work. They are very much community-driven banks. They’re really conscious of where they are located, who their customers are; and they want their facilities and their design and their branding to reflect that. It’s been interesting working with the different banks and seeing their approaches to community banking.
Q: Why do you think the Cape seems to boast such a high concentration of new bank branches?
A: Fenuccio: I know from the Cooperative Bank’s standpoint, they had a desire for some strategic in-fills. They saw some geographic holes in their portfolio, and they felt the timing was right to start to infill some of that.
Raber: And Cape Cod Five’s growth has come through some of the same thinking, added to the fact that they had a lot of growth in deposits. Where that’s coming from, I think they would admit, is from the big national banks, especially in this marketplace. I’m not sure what it is, but once you get over the bridge, people want to bank locally. They want to keep their money here, they want to go see it, they want to have their mortgage there, they keep their safe deposits here.
Q: What surprises you most about the bank branch today?
A: Raber: From what I’ve read, I’ve been expecting banks to get smaller, but that hasn’t been our experience. We talked about less than 2,000-square-foot branches with fewer tellers and more machines, but we’re seeing banks that have more things you can do there. Once you come in, you’re going to see the person who wrote your mortgage, you’re going to see the person you borrowed money from, you’re going to see tellers, and even our small community banks are upgrading mobile banking now. I keep expecting that we’re going to have either less branches or smaller branches and fewer tellers, but we keep building banks with more in them.
Fenuccio: There are very different types of banks, too. It’s not just the free-standing, 5,000-square-foot branch. We did one branch that is only 1,800 square feet. That is a three- to four-person, very tight little neighborhood branch in a heavily residential area. It’s a high traffic area, but it’s a residential area.
Banks seem to be in that in-between zone right now of continuing to appeal to their older customers, who really want the personal contact, and the younger customers, who are much more tech savvy, who are comfortable doing mobile transactions and not even going into the bank. You still have to open an account in person, so there’s still face-to-face interaction. From our perspective, the banks seem to be looking in and trying to both maintain personal service and also offer technology and alternative ways to conduct transactions.
Rick & Kurt’s Top Five Bank Design Trends:
- Increased use of “dialogue-style” teller interaction.
- Encouraging technology-based options with personalized service.
- Visibility to multiple lines of business.
- Increasing transaction volume through multiple points of contact.
- Enhancing and reinforcing the brand in every aspect of branch design.
