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Say Goodbye To Your Neighborhood Bank Branch

Photo Credit Mike Mozart
Photo Credit Mike Mozart

That bank branch on the corner — and the one on the way to work — may not be there much longer.

As technology transforms banking, like it has so many other sectors, the consequence could be a dramatic decline in the industry’s outposts over the next decade, experts say.

Former Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins laid it out in particularly stark terms in a speech last fall: The global industry, under pressure to meet customer demands for automation and cheaper services, will slash employment and branches by 20 percent to 50 percent over the next decade, he estimated.

“I have no doubt that the financial industry will face a series of Uber moments,” he said in the late-November speech in London, referring to the way that Uber and other ride-hailing companies have rapidly unsettled the taxi industry.

And that’s not just the opinion of one well-informed man.

In a recent report, analysts with Citi said they agreed with Jenkins’s view that the number of bank branches could be cut in half over the next decade. A separate survey from Accenture, the management consulting company, shows why: Shifting consumer behavior.

“We believe the consumer banks in the US and Europe are at a tipping point,” wrote the authors of the Citi report, which was published late last month.

The number of bank branches in the United States — represented by the dashed blue line in the chart below — could shrink by a third within the decade, according to their forecasts.

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