Inside the next-gen design Fifth Third will use for future branches

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Fifth Third Bank has unveiled its design for a next-generation branch it will use for all of its new banking centers, starting with its location inside a new Kroger store in Green Township, Ohio, that opened this month.

The dramatically different new look doesn’t give the appearance of a bank branch as we know it. Cincinnati-based Fifth Third (NASDAQ: FITB), ranked No. 10 among the largest U.S.-based retail banks and No. 4 in the Charlotte market based on local deposits of $3.2 billion, designed it to give consumers a more relaxed feel and more face-to-face contact with employees than walking in and immediately being faced with a cold, sterile teller line.

It’ll open the first standalone branch featuring the new design June 17, when it opens a relocated office in the Willis Tower in downtown Chicago. But Fifth Third used the design principles at the much smaller Bank Mart location in the Kroger store in Green Township that opened May 16.

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“We spent a lot of time with customers to ask them what the future looks like,” Mike Butera, Fifth Third’s head of retail, told the Cincinnati Business Courier, a CBJ sister publication. “It looks very different than it has in the past.”

Read more and check out additional photos here.

Cox Media Group