Anyone who has traveled lately can't have helped but notice the scarcity of airline staff at the check-in counter. Where there used to be a crowd of gate agents there are now just a few and they are busy helping passengers "roll their own" most of the time. Over a period of just a few years U.S. air carriers, in spite of, or more correctly because of, woefully thin margins and many years of red ink, were forced to focus heavily on cost containment in their service mixes. They lopped off almost all the customer service staff "fat" and instituted automated services that by and large work. Scan a passport, insert a credit card, touch some screens, drop off a bag if you dare and you're on your way, usually with no intervention from the airline's staff even for changing flight schedules. Similar automated approaches are now business as usual in most grocery outlets of any size and, in fact, at most large retail establishments. Minimum wage-earning clerks have been displaced by "scan it, authorize payment, and bag it yourself" automation.

So far, banks haven't made as big a leap in self-service, at least inside the branch. While a retail bank branch may sit next door to a big-box home improvement center or a major grocery chain's mega-mart (or even be inside one), its customer functions can only be assumed to be similar at some risk. When looking to other industries' successes for inspiration, it helps to understand the differences between bank automation and the automation used by other industries.

Leu change than you think...

Banks are not airlines, not retail merchants, and not possessed of exactly the same management philosophies or motivations. Banking is a cautious, consensus-seeking business because it has always been, at its core, about accepting risk instead of optimizing delivery. This core hasn't always blended well with rapid change and it is not likely to develop a "pedal to the metal" flavor in the future, either. Besides, airlines and major retailers operate in a much more oligopolistic market where a few can "lead." Banking, in spite of mergers and acquisitions, is still a long way away from this.

Bank automation has occurred for years, of course, but has been less "in customers' faces" than in other fields. Think about how your typical branch looked and operated 20 years ago. That's a couple of lifetimes in technology cycles, but in actual years, it was only 1989-not exactly the era of punch cards and tail fins.

In 1989 the shag carpet had long since disappeared, at least in most banking outlets. The dedicated "computer terminal" was disappearing- under siege by the PC. Most branches with any volume had an ATM either in the parking lot or through the wall. What's changed? Not that much compared with the checkin counter at LAX or the check-out line at Safeway.