Sometimes, Sascha Ahnert must stress that he and his counterpart Michael Mahr are still competitors. As Chairman of the management Board of Sparkasse Darmstadt and the speaker of the management Board, Volksbank Darmstadt-Südhessen understand yourself as well as your respective colleagues on the Board well. “We have taken trust in each other,” says Ahnert. And therefore now in a point of common cause. Nevertheless, they remain competitors.
Manfred Köhler
Deputy Department head of the Regional section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and editor of the business magazine Metropolitan.
F. A. Z.
is The common thing that the two credit institutions, on 27.August open up in Messel, in the district of Darmstadt-Dieburg, known by the world heritage site Messel pit, but with 4000 inhabitants, is rather small, their first staffed branch. On Mondays and Fridays, to sit in the premises of the Bank employees of the savings Bank, on Tuesdays and Thursdays the Volksbank. Wednesdays has to do Messel without a Bank. So you’ll stay on the spot, says the Volksbank-in-chief Michael Mahr. So far, business with little frequency to be reduced, often self-service stores have been. “Self-service” might sound great, but it is: not a Bank employee, only vending machines. Prior to this the fate of the inhabitants of Messel’s through this branch retains the division.
The customer responded positively
collaborations of this kind are something Special, not only because of the two competitors cooperate on a crucial point, but mainly because it does not have to do savings banks and cooperative banks else even to each other. Different story, different ownership structures, in many places at all the last credit institutions. And yet, the Darmstädter not have to live with it now that you are in the Region of the first, but the second, the taste of these. The Taunus Sparkasse and Frankfurter Volksbank have it, shortly before Christmas last year, they had opened their first joint branch office in Bad Soden-neuenhain.
Still much older a co-operation in Bad Kissingen, in lower Franconia. There had looked around Darmstadt. What they saw, they liked: the price announcements of the two houses in a showcase one above the other, ATMs side by side, the saving boxes for the children in the two shelves set up. Even in the coffee kitchen, you held out cups and sugar bowls separately. But more important: the customers responded positively. You may suspect that the Alternative would be a vile self-service store.
loan institutions want to continue on individual appearance care
however, There are places where such a vending machine in the first place only because the two houses to cooperate. So, the Sparkasse Darmstadt and the Volksbank Darmstadt-Südhessen initially tested at three vending machine locations, if their cooperation works. In Mühltal-Traisa, Darmstadt-Wixhausen and Pfungstadt-Hahn is already the Logos of the two credit institutions are to be found for a few weeks next to each other at the entrances to small rooms in which the machines of the competitors are near each other. Common locations staff will, in turn, will be this year in pfungstadt-Eschollbrücken and Modautal-Brandau opened. In all places one branch office in each of the two institutions will be closed and others converted to the community branch; the locations with self-service and is taken together with a staff four times the Volksbank “host”, as it is called by the Board of Directors, twice the savings Bank.
other than in the Taunus, it was decided in the South of Hesse, the name of the two credit institutions to be attached outside; the Taunus Sparkasse and Frankfurter Volksbank had opted for the neutral term “financial point”. When it comes to the Details, it gets complicated, as Ahnert reported, so it had to be clarified with the data protection agencies of both houses, whether old records must be disposed of in the same “Destruction bin”, which was answered in the affirmative. The Volksbank-in-chief is sure of himself, that no house will make the other customers away, The savings Bank Director, emphasises that each Institute eighth still on his individual appearance. The opening Hours differ on different days, slightly different from each other.
