Apart from it being a boring bank and inevitably having cheap looking paneled exterior materials, the form is totally fine. The building does a better job that nearby examples (e.g. Martell Block) of wrapping around to the alley to offer a complete street wall and a very pedestrian interface.
Given the boom times in Marda Loop and the property values, perhaps it's not surprising that every major bank and retail chain wants a location there. It doesn't bode well for the pedestrian-oriented quirky, local hole-in-the-wall places - but that's a problem everywhere in Calgary, thanks to our historical lack of existing street fabric and old (i.e. cheap) pedestrian-oriented buildings almost everywhere outside the immediate inner city. New builds are expensive, major banks and chains pay good rents.
Marda Loop's name recognition, rapidly growing local population, and incredibly high average local household incomes will lead to this.
The real trick will be to figure out how to unlock the tasteful smaller scale/cheaper pedestrian oriented retail concept overall, not just this parcel. Marda Loop, to it's credit is one of the few areas actually adding small-scale pedestrian-oriented retail where there wasn't any before - and the results are very mixed, almost to the point of complete experimentation, as if no one has ever done this type/scale of project before.
It took a while for the city and developers to figure out how to build low-scale, tasteful but reasonably dense infill townhomes successfully - I think we need a similar effort to figure out low-scale pedestrian-oriented retail. Many of our inner city communities are now reaching sufficient density that local pedestrian retail can be supported as one-offs, clusters or mini-main streets. However, just as the townhomes battles of the past decades, there seems to be invisible roadblocks to successful quality outcomes for low-scale pedestrian retail where none have existed previously. Combined with a seeming lack of interest/imagination by developers, we have surprisingly few good examples of this scale of retail development.
Here's one of my favourites at Britannia Plaza to get a sense of what I am talking about as a quality low-scale retail design, and even it didn't get the alley interface correct for some reason.
From the front onto the Britannia shopping area - A+:
Alley interface is too wide and open with surface parking, doomed to forever makes a wide gap in the street wall:
