On Friday, RBS announced plans to close 259 of its bank branches. That’s a quarter of its outposts. 62 of the closures are Royal Bank of Scotland branches, while the other 197 are NatWest. This isn’t the only announcement of bank closures in the past couple of days, either. Lloyds are also closing 49 branches, and Yorkshire Building Society are closing 13 – but the RBS closures are certainly the most dramatic, and the ones that will affect the most people.
Of course, yet again the reason given to the public for these closures is that the bank branches are underused. It’s the standard argument; more customers are using online services for their banking, which means that high street branches are less popular. RBS claim that the use of their bank branches has dropped by 40% since 2014.
I can see their point.
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