Bank Hapoalim

 

Bank Hapoalim

An invited competition declared the need for a new way of looking at private banking.

We started from scratch challenging anything we knew about private banking. We soon realized that the solution did not lay within the spatial qualities of the banking spaces but rather in a mental and a behavioral revolution. A revolution could start only by the heads of the bank and then seep down to the lower management which would only then be obliged, not without first expressing their disbelief, to accept an extremely challenging way of looking at the customers. Recognizing the futility of the situation we were determined to finish what we started.

A new language was needed for the revolution; clear, simple, honest, authentic and friendly. Its vocabulary would endow the private banking with credibility, professionalism, efficiency, leadership and uniqueness. It would hold the client as a unique and influential entity which needs to be looked at through totally different eyes.

We developed a new spatial vocabulary to be able to speak; out the window went notions such as private and public, tables and counters, cubicles and waiting areas. Corridors followed then serial advisers in serial cubicles with serial furniture under serial lighting. Numbers and signage disappeared, so did the gate keepers and so did anything that could arouse the slightest memory of the old days of service banking…..