Commerce Bank

Background

Commerce Bank has more than 340 branches in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, while 2005 saw it enter Connecticut and the Washington, DC, metro region. To live up to its self-ascribed title of "America's Most Convenient Bank," Commerce offers a wide range of financial products and emphasizes consumer-friendly service, with many of its offices open seven days a week until 8:00 PM. Commerce continues to grow through vigorous branch construction in retail sites, and has set itself a goal of opening 700 offices by 2009.

Challenge

Commerce Bank has assets of $38 billion, positioning it as the largest locally headquartered independent bank in the Philadelphia area. In keeping true to its standing as a local staple in banking, Commerce Bank prides itself on providing customers with convenient, quality financial services, whenever and wherever they choose. During its efforts to expand throughout the New York area, Commerce Bank focused on locations in many ethnically diverse neighborhoods that required special linguistic needs.

• Commerce sought to create a series of strong brand voices without compromising the cultural integrity of each language./li>
• Exisiting content needed to be localized within a dynamic authoring process. Also, tight time restrictions were essential to facilitate Commerce's rapid expansion.
• In order to incorporate various ethnic groups, a glossary of terms needed to be developed based on content requiring very precise banking terminology.

Solution

Translations.com was enlisted to conduct a series of cultural assessments of those neighborhoods where Commerce Bank had already taken up residence, as well as locations where it sought to build new branches.

• Translations.com performed hours of cultural observation, including interviews conducted by native speakers of the target markets, to determine which languages Commerce Bank needed to adapt.
• Translators were selected to upgrade linguistic content, and coordinated to work with dedicated teams to further ensure consistency.
• A three-stage language review was created to certify integrity of content and adaptation..
• Localized content was further incorporated to build Banca Personal, an online banking website tailored specifically toward Spanish speakers in the US domestic market.

As a result of the partnership between Commerce Bank and Translations.com, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Spanish localizations have been introduced throughout Commerce Bank's portfolio of offerings. Our continued relationship aims at bridging the gap between countries and cultures in an effort to work as one community. Together, we hope to accomplish much more in future endeavors with Commerce Bank.

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