The closure of offices and ATMs continues to especially affect rural Spain. It is true that banks are making an effort to open alternative channels (through the Post Office or mobile offices) to fill this gap, but users still prefer to go to a regular branch, even if they have to travel several kilometers to town to do so. next door According to the latest monitoring report prepared by the Bank of Spain on In-person accessibility to banking services, The number of bank offices in Spain decreased by 7.2% in 2022, going from 19,014 to 17,648 active branches. This drop is greater, in relative terms, in the smallest municipalities, those with less than 500 inhabitants, where the drop was 11% compared to the 426 that there were in December 2021.
However, in recent years Banks have tried to compensate for the closure of their offices with other alternative ways of serving customers in the areas of the Spain emptied, where there is a lower population density. That is why, according to the Bank of Spain, last year these alternative channels grew by 22.1%, going from 1,109 to 1,354; and in the case of smaller municipalities it did compensate for the closure of traditional offices, especially thanks to the arrival of mobile branches and a greater number of financial agents. “Once both bank offices and alternative channels are taken into account, between 2021 and 2022, a drop of 0.8% was recorded in the total number of in-person access points to banking services,” the report notes.
Whether or not the closure of offices in the towns was compensated, the truth is that the bank did not open a single more branch in the entire country last year. Yes, there were 26 municipalities that lost their bank offices and another 40 stopped having ATMs, mainly in rural Spain.in those towns with less than 500 inhabitants, since they concentrated the closure of 18 branches (of the 26) and 31 ATMs, 77% of the total. Of the total of 56 municipalities that lost the only in-person access point they had over the past year, whatever it was, 45 of them had less than 500 inhabitants.
The problem is that, despite the banks’ efforts to find alternatives for the population in the most remote areas, people are not using them. “Alternative channels in areas without a stable office have a minority use”, the report highlights. “In general, the population residing in these municipalities goes to others with offices to carry out their banking transactions.” This means that almost 6 out of every 10 inhabitants of the smallest towns travel to others where there is a physical branch and they can be served.
In general terms, only 8% of the Spanish population already uses telephone banking and 1% uses alternative channels that the bank is implementing such as financial agents, ofibuses or Correos Cash. Half say they use banking services onlineand the vast majority go to ATMs (3 out of 4) and 62% to the office to carry out their procedures. These figures are even more relevant in the case of over 65 years that, in practice, they say they do not use alternative channels and therefore the Bank of Spain considers that “it would be advisable to analyze in depth whether these channels really have the capacity to mitigate the possible risks of financial exclusion that this group faces.”
Worth a look