Busy Bank Branches Closed, As Banks Are Economic With The Truth!

This is an article from the Daily Record in 2018.

A quote.

“Customer numbers at closure-threatened RBS branches are up to 20 times higher than those suggested by official bank figures, a Sunday Mail investigation has found.”

The story is absolutely 100% CORRECT.

The Payment Choice Alliance has visited communities up and down the UK and have discovered the same “incompetence” when banks issue customer numbers.

This story broke at exactly the same time as our Chair Ron Delnevo was telling the BBC that thousands of free-to-use ATMs would be lost due to the LINK Scheme Ltd being allowed to reduce the already tiny payments to ATM operators for each cash withdrawal.

The Bank of England said Ron was scaremongering.

The outcome? Well over 20,000 free-to-use ATMs have been lost.

The banks didn’t want the ATMs ripped out when they closed branches replaced. So payments to ATM operators had to be too low to allow replacement.

Let’s be completely transparent.

This is NOT about “incompetence”.

The UK public have been consistently LIED to for YEARS.

What COULD have been the future of bank branches is made crystal clear by the statistics on internet shopping.

Today in the UK, around 28% of retail purchases are made via the internet.This peaked at around 37% during covid. It has never been above 40%.

If retailers like Marks and Spencer had taken the same approach as the major UK banks,they could have simply moved their whole business to the Internet,telling us nobody is using their branches any more.

87% of UK adults make some purchases on the Internet - roughly the same percentage as have smartphones - so Marks and Spencer’s could simply have decided to try to force those 87% to shop only online by closing their high street branches down.

Why didn’t Marks and Spencer close all their branches down, forcing their customers online?

BECAUSE THEY COULD NOT GUARANTEE OTHER RETAILERS WOULD DO THE SAME.

The banks haven’t had the same problem.

All of the Big Five UK banks decided,effectively simultaneously,to close their branches down and rip out ATMs.

If one bank - Charlie Nunn and his Lloyds Banking Group ? - had decided to go against this trend, it would not have played out as it has.

Branch customers numbers would have been down because of the Internet and apps, BUT if banks had worked at attracting customers to their branches, as Marks and Spencer do as retailers, those branches could have been enjoying a good percentage of the footfall they had before the internet came along.

How high? 50%? 60%? 70%?

We won’t see an estimate from the banks BUT a recent Post Office Ltd survey revealed that 48% of adults had used in-person banking in the last month - and that in a situation where there are almost no bank branches now!

I have no idea how much of the truth about what’s happened in relation to branch banking in the UK will be revealed by the HM Treasury Access to Banking Services Review, Chaired by Richard Lloyd.

We shall see.

If PM Andy Burnham does want the full facts, he knows where we are.