Management

Bank USA credit card division

            The Bank of United States operates in twenty states providing a full range of financial services to different individuals and business organizations. The credit card division is a profit center of the bank. The division has experienced a twenty percent growth rate in the past five years. It processes two types of credit cards. One type of the credit cards is meant for traditional card issuers such as savings and loan banks, credit unions, small banks that have no credit card processing capability, selected private label firms such as retail chain Bank USA’s own credit card. The second group of credit card customers includes major brokers and corporations. The corporate customers make use of traditional card issuers but they also have access to other account files and the desired cash management service.

There are problems that are faced by the credit card division. The main problem that is faced by the division is that it has no total control over providing accurate and timely report distribution because they have to depend on other banks for detailed information such as debt notices and various transportation modes such as courier services. The performance criteria of the division do not match up well between marketing and operations yet trends in the marketing customer survey are helpful to everyone. The other problem is that the division does not consider averages. This is because they tend to believe that if they give false information to their clients on their quarterly performances, chances are that they will not be in a position to find out the truth, which is not the case. Customers can gauge a banks performance by looking at the services provided to them by the bank.

There are steps that are required to develop a good internal and external performance and information system. This can be achieved by ensuring that the marketing department gives the right information to the clients. The credit card division should come up with a numerical basis for knowing how well the internal process performance matches up with the external performance .The division should avoid multiple sites and too many services that may complicate the analysis of their basic problem. To ensure good performance of the credit card division, the individuals in the division should match the marketing and the operations performance information. This is to make sure that the information given to the customers by the marketers is the service extended to them by the operations department.

The best performance in the credit card division is recorded at a point when the external performance data is matched to the internal performance data. From exhibit 3.7, it is evident that the highest performance was 86.3 % a time when external and internal data was matched at 1.1. During a time when there was a mismatch in the external and internal performances were mismatched. This is illustrated in exhibit 3.7 where the performance dropped from 84.5% to 84.3% after there was an increase in the mismatch range from 0.1 to 0.8. The performance later increased from 84.3% to 86.3%, a 2% increment when the range was minimized to 0.

The real service level depends on what is measured both from external and internal performance. This is because an increment in the division’s performance relies entirely on both external and internal performance. In addition, internal performance relies on external performance. This is because customers rely so much on the information provided to them by the marketers. Therefore, the internal division, that is the operations department, should ensure that the information provided to their customers do not differ to the information provided by the marketers. Matching both external and internal performance data augments the performance of a company.

In conclusion, it can be recommended that the USA Bank credit card division should ensure that its external performance data is similar to its internal performance data. This should be done to enable the bank deal with the problems that it faces. This ensures that there is no a mismatch in the information that the bank provides to its customers on its quarterly performances and the services that are provided to the customers by the bank. This results to an increment in general performance of the bank.