Citizens CEO on teller-less branches, IPO, jobs and retail woes

Citizens Financial Group, the U.S. parent to Citizens Bank, just had its first quarterly earnings period since its $3.5 billion initial public offering. The company's overseas parent, Royal Bank of Scotland, sold 29 percent of Citizens Financial for $3.5 billion earlier this month and plans to divest itself of the rest of Citizens by 2016.

CEO Bruce Van Saun has spent the last year at the helm of Providence, R.I.-based Citizens and will guide it into the future as an independent entity. We recently talked about a number of issues facing the bank.

• Teller-less branches: About 40 percent of Citizens branches no longer have bank tellers. They have been replaced by what the bank calls "universal bankers" who can still help customers with transactions when needed but have been trained to handle a variety of customer service-related issues. With fewer customers conducting in-branch transactions, several banks are cutting back on tellers and focusing instead on smart ATM machines that can handle traditional teller functions. Citizens is no different.

Van Saun said in the next five to 10 years, the bank plans to reshape its branch footprint. Because 70 percent of its branches are leased, that will take some time. But the plan is to shrink the size of the average branch by either giving back space or relocating into a smaller space. This way, the bank will be able to save on real estate costs while maintaining the revenue it generates from them.

• Jobs: Citizens cut its workforce by 4 percent, or 800 jobs, since the start of the year. But 700 of them emanate from the sale of Charter One Bank branches in Chicago earlier this year. But Van Saun said the bank plans to add commercial lenders as well as mortgage lenders and wealth managers. One example would be expanding the bank's health care business banking unit into the Philadelphia region earlier this year.

Jeff Blumenthal covers banking, insurance and law.