PNC to Complement Branch Expansion With New Online Banking Platform

PNC Financial Service Group will soon roll out a new online banking platform that will complement its investment in new branch locations and renovations, bank executives said Thursday (Jan. 16).

“When we do customer surveys and get feedback experience with PNC, we score off the charts on our branch experience and we are no better than average with our online and mobile,” PNC Chairman and CEO William S. Demchak said during the company’s quarterly earnings call. “We need to do better than average, which is why we are pursuing this.”

The new online banking platform will be cloud-native and micro service-based, Demchak said. It will provide customers with easier navigation and more self-service and will enable the bank to more quickly make changes and introduce products, he added.

“Highly complex and big investment that we’ve been at for a couple of years, and ultimately it will raise our scores with the consumers on online,” Demchak said.

PNC Bank said in November that it plans to open 200 new branch locations in 12 cities and renovate 1,400 existing branches over the next five years.

Those figures represented an expansion upon the plans for 100 new branch locations and 1,200 renovations the bank announced about nine months earlier.

Currently, PNC Bank has more than 2,200 branches across the country, together with 60,000 PNC and partner ATMs, online and mobile banking platforms, a customer care center and 22 mobile branches.

Executives reiterated those plans during Thursday’s earnings call.

“We are doubling our new branch builds to gain scale on some of the fastest growing regions in the country,” Demchak said. “And, on the corporate side, we recently announced our entry into the Salt Lake City market.”

PNC Chief Financial Officer Robert Q. Reilly said during the call that PNC Bank will add branches in South Florida, Texas, Arizona and Colorado.

“Importantly, the investment that we are making is not at all catch-up to something we should have done,” Demchak said. “This is new branches, it is new technology, it is larger data centers that are more resilient — it is everything positioning us to accelerate our organic growth. So, these are all dollars spent to make money.”