Why we still have branches
A fair question, and one our board asks properly every year rather than ritually. Branches are the most expensive thing we own. Most transactions no longer need one. So why nine?
The transactions do not need one. The conversations do.
Nobody comes in to deposit a cheque any more, and they should not — the app does it in fifteen seconds. What people still come in for is every situation where the answer is not obvious: a loan that does not fit a form, a mistake that needs unwinding, a death in the family and no idea what happens to the accounts.
Those are not high-volume. They are high-stakes, and they are almost impossible to do well through a contact centre reading from a script.
Who would lose
Closing branches is easy to justify on averages and hard to justify on people. Our oldest members do not bank on a phone and are not going to start. Members whose English is a second language would rather sit with someone. Someone in genuine financial trouble will say it out loud to a person in a room and will not type it into a form.
Every one of those is a minority of transactions. Together they are a large share of the moments where being a member matters at all.
What we have changed instead
Fewer tellers, more people who can actually decide something. A branch visit that used to be a queue for a transaction is now more often an appointment with someone empowered to say yes. That costs less than the old model and is worth more.
We have also stopped pretending every branch needs identical hours. Two of the nine are open fewer days because the members there told us which days they use.
The honest version
If we were built to maximise return, we would have closed three of these by now. We are not, and we have not, and that is the clearest illustration we have of what member-owned means when it costs something.