In five years, PNC Bank says, two-thirds of its branches won't have tellers. The reason is customers like Michael Mercado.

The Lancaster Township resident figures he's visited a bank branch exactly once this year.

"The strip on my debit card wasn't working," said Mercado, a regional vice president for pretzel company Auntie Anne's. "I went into the branch to get a new card."

Apart from that, Mercado and his wife do their banking using ATMs, computers and mobile phones, he said.

Judging that such habits are becoming the norm, PNC has decided to convert two-thirds of its locations within five years to a "universal branch" format that eliminates traditional teller windows, William Demchak, CEO of The PNC Financial Services Group Inc., told industry analysts this week.

"It will drop the operating cost out of it and it will deliver a service that tomorrow's bank client expects," Demchak said, according to a transcript of his remarks.

"This is being driven by customer choices," PNC spokesman Fred Solomon told Lancaster Newspapers. "Visits to the teller line are down dramatically."

Instead of teller lines, PNC universal branches will have concierge desks staffed by financial consultants armed with iPads, Solomon said. The staffers will be able to assist with routine transactions, but also will be able to demonstrate mobile banking and advise customers on PNC's products and services, he said.

The consultative role is more demanding and will offer increased salary and incentive opportunities for employees, Solomon said. Tellers will be able to retrain for the new positions, and branch staffing numbers aren't expected to change significantly, he said.

The initial rollout involves 45 branches, he said. One of them is at 2847 Willow Street Pike in Willow Street.

At present, tellers there work behind a heavy marble counter. A teller told a customer Thursday the bank would be remodeled for the new format shortly after the New Year.

"It's pretty cool" that the bank is serving as a model for PNC's new approach, the teller said.

PNC has about 30 branches in Lancaster County, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Statistics confirm the decrease in transactions at bank branches: They have dropped by nearly half since 1992, according to a 2013 study by consulting firm Financial Management Solutions Inc.

That reduces demand for tellers. Their employment is projected to grow by just 1 percent between 2010 and 2020, compared with average growth for all occupations of 14 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Security concerns limit mobile banking's appeal for some people. Ben McMillen, who owns Ben McMillen Photography in Columbia, said he won't risk installing his bank's app on his cell phone.

Yet McMillen still rarely visits his bank, doing most of his banking on his computer. He said he deposits checks at his bank a couple of times a month, "and that's it."

PNC says only about one in five of its customers makes more than occasional use of its branches.

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Other banks also see the changes, though so far they're not reacting as dramatically as PNC.

"We don't have a plan to not have tellers in branches," Fulton Bank spokeswoman Laura Wakeley said.

Susquehanna Bank is not planning any major changes in its approach, said Craig Kauffman, the bank's regional president for Lancaster.

"We're going to be driven by the preferences of our customers," he said.

A majority of Wells Fargo depositors visit a store - the bank's term for branches - at least once every six months, spokesman James A. Baum said.

"We are as committed to our stores as ever," he said.

Given trends in customer preferences, it makes sense for banks to be thinking about a "higher value-added" model for staffing, industry consultant George Millward said.

The potential pitfall: You can't turn tellers into financial advisers overnight.

Traditionally, tellers have done routine, relatively low-paid work, said Millward, a managing partner at The Kafafian Group Inc. in New Jersey. By and large, they aren't equipped to advise people on navigating their financial lives, Millward said.

That's a much more advanced skill, and building it "takes a lot of work," he said.

Banks will have to invest more in training as well as salary and incentive packages, he said. That will "really turn on its head the economics of running a branch," he said.

Moreover, if customers start to feel they're just targets for sales pitches, they won't be happy, he said.

At Integrity Bank, teller transactions are up, not down, President and CEO Jim Gibson said.

"We believe people still like to do business with people," he said.

Like Millward, Gibson said good bank tellers don't necessarily make good salespeople or financial consultants. If you try to force them to be that, "it doesn't work well," he said.

Banking is just one of many industries where information technology is driving change, Millward said. Car sales are another; customers armed with Internet research and price comparisons are forcing dealerships to change the pay structure and the approach of their sales staffs.

"It's very much a different world across the board," he said.