J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. , the new owners of Washington Mutual, Inc. are undoing the roughly $1 billion branch make-overs that WaMu implemented in about 900 branches. The radical design was called "Occasio," which means "favorable opportunity" in Latin, and was even patented by WaMu to keep other banks from using it.

The re-think replaced bank-teller windows with free-standing counters and cash-dispensing machines to create a warm and fuzzy retail-banking strategy. Apparently, the design was implemented by a retail design firm that also designed the Disney retail stores. But the question is: did they have experience with service design? Designing a space in which people deal with their money is far different than buying plush toys.

When WaMu customers walked in the door they saw a "concierge desk" where an employee would direct them to tellers standing in the middle of the branch. Since Occasio tellers didn’t handle cash, customers who wanted to withdraw money had to take a slip of paper from a teller to a cash dispenser, entering a numerical code.

Other banks have tried but failed to reinvent the traditional branch concept. In the late 1990s, First Union Corp., now part of Wells Fargo & Co. , launched "Future Bank," emphasizing video kiosks and electronic banking over traditional teller transactions. It was a flop, hurting the Charlotte, N.C., bank’s revenue and fueling a customer backlash that took years to mend.

Even the J.P. Morgan executive charged with dismantling Occasio had his own flirtation with one-on-one teller stations earlier this decade when he ran the retail business at Chicago-based Bank One Corp. "We thought it would be more engaging for customers to be close to the teller," he said. "It just didn’t work."