In a nutshell 🥥 Coconut Software CEO Katherine Regnier breaks down how the company’s branch workforce management solution moves financial institutions out of archaic spreadsheets and blind planning into a data environment that helps them forecast demand, align the right roles and skills to each branch, and give leaders a smarter way to make staffing decisions without all the guesswork. This kind of innovative visibility gives managers more hours saved, the ability to improve service, and reduce costs.
For years, the industry has asked whether the branch still matters. The better question is:
What kind of branch are we building?
Branches are not disappearing. Instead, they’re becoming advice centers, places where trust is built, complex conversations happen, and customers still want a human connection. And we’re seeing this in action in the strategies of the North American’s leading enterprise banks. Case in point:, PNC said its branch expansion plan raises its total branch investment to approximately $2 billion by 2030.
That shift raises the bar. Branch leaders are not being asked to choose between efficiency and effectiveness. They are being asked to deliver both.
That’s why visibility matters.
Visibility. It bears repeating.
If a branch is going to operate as an advice center, leaders need visibility into demand, skills, utilization, and outcomes. Without it, they are left guessing. And guesswork leads to familiar problems: overstaffed branches, understaffed branches, hours lost to manual scheduling, and bottlenecks that are only noticed once the customer experience is already suffering. Lost opportunity and a decrease in customers loyalty.
That is exactly why we launched Branch Workforce Management.
Coconut’s AI-powered solution helps banks and credit unions move beyond spreadsheets and gut-feel planning. It uses appointment, lobby, and walk-in data to forecast demand, align the right roles and skills to each branch, and give leaders a smarter way to make staffing decisions without all the guesswork.
That is more than a scheduling improvement. It is a visibility improvement.
It also has measurable operational impact. Branch Workforce Management can help managers reclaim up to eight hours per week otherwise spent on manual scheduling, while delivering demand forecasts with an error rate of under 7.5%, compared with an industry average typically cited at 15–20%. For executive teams under pressure to improve revenue and customer experience while reducing cost, that kind of visibility is not a nice-to-have. It is foundational.
I believe this is why so many advice-center strategies feel right conceptually, but stall operationally.
The vision is there. Operations leaders have been trying to answer this for years: what should the branch footprint be, what services should each branch offer, and how do we align people, process, and technology to get the most out of that footprint? The challenge is not ambition. The challenge is that the operating model has not kept up with the strategy.
Advice centers need visibility and data to function in an optimal way.
They need a live, connected understanding of what demand is forming, where capacity exists, where service is breaking down, and where revenue opportunities are being lost.
Yes: It is possible to remove staffing as a back-office exercise and start aligning it to the peaks and valleys of customer demand as a strategic lever for branch performance.
Because the modern branch does not win by having more people.
It wins by having the right people, in the right place, at the right time, with the right context.
That is what makes a branch more efficient.
More importantly, it is what makes a branch more effective.
And when you get both at the same time, you do not just run a better branch.
You build a better advice center.
