What does a young consumer do today when he wants to choose a bank?

He might check out what interest rates are offered on savings accounts or loans, or he might just want to know which bank has the coolest mobile app. We know one thing he won’t do — walk into the nearest branch to ask if the bank might be “right” for him.

Location of branches is no longer of paramount importance in choosing an FI,said Paul Schaus, chief executive of CCG Catalyst, a bank consultancy. There are ATMs seemingly everywhere, yet customers, particularly young customers, have little reason to go to the branch.

Our imaginary customer might want to know what his friends on social media think and what customers and employees have to say about the bank online, such as on Yelp, Glassdoor, Reddit, Quora, Twitter … so where should they go to find all that beyond a basic Google search?

Unfortunately, there is no such place yet (paging Bankrate). What would such a service might look like if it did exist?

It could work roughly like the site Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates movie reviews to determine whether a movie is “rotten” or not. Comments would be aggregated from social media sites as well as reviews sites, and Google Play and the iTunes App Store.  There is a huge amount of information out there on banks, and social media management tools such as Sprinklr help them gather this information into actionable intelligence.

Consumers need the same thing.

From all these information sources, a metric could be created, and then a rating. It would be a way for banks doing a great job to stand out above the competition. In an era where branch location is not of primary importance, differentiation is difficult. A rating like this could helps banks doing a great job on mobile or with customer service to stand out in a way that is easy for potential customers to understand.