Santander to shut 95 branches on British high street with 750 jobs at risk after ‘difficult decision’

5 comments

1. Difficult to take less profits

2. To be fair, I’m willing to bet this is after years of making the service worse intentionally to try and “soften the blow”.

   I live in a major UK city, and our massive branch of Barclays (in one of the biggest ornate buildings) doesn’t have any tellers on a Saturday. They just open so people can use the indoor cashpoints with a couple of people on duty for help/security. The Barclays in the town over had 2 machines and 2 tellers, 3 machines and 1 teller, 3 machines and no tellers and finally closed down. If you want a service the machines couldn’t provide you had to call a phone number.

   And, most importantly, when it was 3 machines and 1 teller, it was 3 machines with basically no queue vs. 1 teller with a queue of 19 people, because overwhelmingly it was clear that people wanted to *deal with a person*.

   Online banking is great. It’s useful. But I didn’t want it as an *alternative* to actually having a functioning high street bank, yet I’m not being given the choice as *all* of the banks and building societies seem to be going the same way.

3. Is Metro Bank the only ones taking human interaction seriously?

4. Good riddance. Santander are the absolute worst

5. In some places the Post Office is taking on the job of face to face banking for various banks. Done well this could be a money spinner but the level of privacy and well as security would have to change dramatically.

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