Letās face it, branch banking is dead.
Except that some banks insist you visit a branch to collect a card/sign paperwork/provide ID. I suspect it will be a fraudsterās paradise if they go full app only.
Online only banks currently operate without branches. You have your send ID via the post, and sometimes get it countersigned. One would hope the banking hubs will be available.
I donāt disagree, to a point. Today, (at time of posting), I had a major life event, I paid off my mortgage, years early and consequently, Iāve saved myself many Ā£thousands in interest. It has been a planned event. Reached the end of a stupidly low interest rate after 5 years and the monthly jump to SVR was too ridiculous to contemplate. Even the current re-mortgage rates werenāt that favourable. My main concern, was how I was going to effect the repayment, after all, Iām not talking about an insignificant amount of money.
I could have risked just doing it all online by myself, or even through my āphone App. Instead, I chose to go to the building society that the mortgage payment is normally paid from. The mortgage wasnāt held with the building society. I donāt ordinarily use bank branches at all, everything I do is via banking Apps, but it just didnāt feel right to risk doing it all by myself.
What I experienced at the building society, was in all honesty, the best in branch banking experience Iāve had in decades. The staff member who dealt with me displayed absolute utter professionalism in the ten minutes I was stood there in an almost empty branch. It was no skin off his nose, the mortgage wasnāt held with them, but Iāve been a customer for 20 years, not at that branch, but all the same, itās the longest standing banking provider Iāve had. And was I pleased I went in! All done via Faster Payment over the counter, but in several transactions because thereās a limit on how much you can pay using FP, something I wasnāt actually aware of and I just know if I had attempted to pay this off by myself, the risk of a mistake, would have been devastating for me.
Anyway, all done, no fuss, no problem, all with the security of being done by someone whose day job is handling customer payments and a full receipt of every transaction and annotated as being completed in Branch.
So yes, whilst branch banking is being carted off to the graveyard, it was there when I felt I needed it most.
They will keep their branches orā¦ adapt their processes and then close them. There is an extra level of fraud, but Starmer has scrapped what the obvious answer was to verify things that need a high level of trust (online) (Digital ID).
We instead will have a patchwork of āuse this private provider at my company onlyā. Yoti seems to be the most used now (along with Lloyds Bank SmartID and PostOffice EasyID) so I am hoping it will form a monopoly in practice (never thought Iād write these words). HMG recently is really shit policy after shit policy, while the Europeans next to us do everything right.
The times Iāve needed to use the local Nationwide branch, theyāve also been fantastic.
Whilst the app-based banks serve a purpose, I wouldnāt be that keen to throw branches away. The big life events really benefit from the knowledge and experience of branch staff.
Also, the Lloyds app isnāt very good. I donāt know where the in-app verification messages go when you tap on the notification, so I normally resort to using the automated phone call. Itās such a chaotic mess it makes the Monzo app seem user-friendly.